SOURCE: A review of The Moor's Last Sigh, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 242, No. 40, October 2, 1995, p. 52.

Below, the critic offers a positive assessment of The Moor's Last Sigh.

Not since Midnight's Children has Rushdie produced such a dazzling novel. Nor has he curbed his urgent indignation or muffled his satiric tongue. In a spirited story related at a breakneck pace and crammed full of melodrama, slapstick, supple wordplay and literary allusions, Rushdie has again fashioned a biting parable of modern India. Telling his story "with death at my heels," the eponymous narrator relates the saga of a family whose religious, political and cultural differences replicate the fault lines by which India is riven. The Moor tells of "family rifts and premature deaths and thwarted loves and mad passions and weak chests and power and money and … the seductions and mysteries of art." He speculates on the duality of all...