SOURCE: "Rushdie on India: Serious, Crammed Yet Light," in The New York Times, December 28, 1995, pp. C13, C20.

In the following review, Kakutani describes the ways in which the story and characters of The Moor's Last Sigh relate the author's own views of his native country.

In Salman Rushdie's remarkable new novel, the narrator describes the astonishing paintings created by his mother: paintings teeming with the life of Bombay's streets, paintings that capture "the face-slapping quarrels of naked children at a tenement standpipe," "the elated tension of the striking sailors at the gates to the naval yards" and the "shipwrecked arrogance of the English officers from whom power was ebbing like the waves," paintings layered upon older paintings and concealing untold secrets of the past.

Behind all this, the narrator observes, was his mother's "sense of the inadequacy of the world, of its failure to live up to her...