At the conclusion of The Moor's Last Sigh Moraes Zogoiby flees an apocalyptic Bombay of gang wars, bombings, and communal violence and heads for Spain. There he is imprisoned by an enemy who forces him to write his personal and family history. The reader then turns back to the start of the novel, which continues the narrator's flight and story, as Moraes nails pages of his tale to trees in an act which he sees as equivalent to Luther's theses while recalling his mother's remark that he is full of feces. Moraes is the Moor of the title, although he is Jew, Christian, and Indian. His mother's side of the family is descended from the Portuguese who settled Goa, and his father's side can trace its lineage to the Christian Reconquest of Spain when both Moors and Jews were expelled. They have been Indian for many centuries.

The Moor's Last Sigh is thus another version of Midnight's Children, which used an improbable, fantastic family history as a way to retell the story of modern India from, in the earlier novel, the penetration of Western rationalism and science in the North during the late nineteenth century through major events of the independence movement until the progressive vision of Nehru was destroyed by the emergence of a nativistic, dynastic feudalism during the Emergency under Indira Gandhi. In the new novel Indian history is told from the perspective of the South, with its many minorities, rather than the Hindu-Islamic North, and Indira's dynastic perversion of nationalism is supplanted by fanatical nativist thugs who violently destroy whatever they regard as non-Hindu. So, the wandering Jew has become the wandering Moor, symbolic of India's threatened minorities and the rejection of the westernized elite who founded the nation. The narrator has become a homeless expatriate.

World, national, and family history in Rushdie's novel have autobiographical and literary foundations. Like Scheherazade, the narrator has staved off execution by telling, or inventing, his Thousand and One Nights. He has descended through an Inferno until at the end he had a co-prisoner, an art restorer, who, also faced by death, became a deconstructionist carefully picking away at the surface of a painting by Moraes's mother to reveal what was painted over. A masterpiece entitled The Moor's Last Sigh about the mother's death was formerly a painting offering erotic self-display to her lover. Art, like history, culture, and identity, is palimpsestic.

Such motifs suggest something of the imaginative landscape, power, and ideas in The Moor's Last Sigh. In themes, symbols, scenes, and ironies, it is the richest of Rushdie's novels. It is at times unsatisfying in the way that his writing can be. That larger-than-life narrator, the cartoonish characters, the nonstop punning, the self-conscious allusions, the lack of other voices, the tricks in plotting repeated from Rushdie's previous novels (the narrator has another father, he and the nation are cracking up), and the often clichéd language have become too familiar. Rushdie can be dense. When he was parroting trendy ideas about revolution, did he not see that Fanon's criticism of neocolonialism could apply to the class of which he is part? When he attacks Naipaul's defense of Bombay fundamentalists, can he really not see Naipaul's point that such radicalism is how groups outside of power organize themselves and find a voice?

Even if at times Rushdie lacks bottom, I still would not want to miss any of his novels. His style is as unique and influential as Picasso's, and he always manages to write powerfully about the defining issues of our time.