SOURCE: "Where the Wonders Never Cease," in Book World—The Washington Post, January 7, 1996, pp. 1-2.

In the following review, Dirda finds The Moor's Last Sigh further evidence of his contention that Rushdie is among the world's greatest writers.

Over the past several years Salman Rushdie has become, to his sorrow, such a symbolic figure that it is easy to lose sight of the most important fact about him: He really is one of the world's great writers. One need only read the first sentence of this wondrous new novel—a book comparable, it seems to me, to Robertson Davies' masterpiece, What's Bred in the Bone, even, at times, to Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude—to feel its irresistible narrative pace, its openly melodramatic panache:

"I have lost count of the days that have passed since I fled the horrors of Vasco Miranda's mad fortress in the...