The Moors Last Sigh: Wickedly Comic Essay example -- Moors Last Sigh

Hopping in a careful, calculated manner across four generations of a rich and demented Indian family, Salman Rushdie's cynical novel The Moor's Last Sigh laughs mischievously at the world and shivers from its evils. Weaving a tale of murder and suicide, of atheism and asceticism, of affection and adultery, Rushdie's exquisitely crafted storytelling explains the "fall from grace of a high-born crossbreed," namely our narrator Moraes Zogoiby, also known as "Moor." At the centerpiece of this odd and captivating tale stand the embers of Moor's family: a complex web including a ridiculed political activist, a shrew, a homosexual husband, an artist, and a Jewish underworld gangster, among others. Moor's sisters lead lives as abnormal and doomed as their family history would predispose them towards: Ina, a washed-up model, dies in the throes of insanity; Minnie takes holy orders, predicting a great plague washing over Bombay and envisioning talking rats; Mynah, a lesbian, hopelessly infatuated with Moor's lover, dies in an industrial "accident" that m y~be~her~ father's doing. Such is ...