SOURCE: King, Bruce. Review of The Moor's Last Sigh, by Salman Rushdie. World Literature Today 70, no. 3 (summer 1996): 694-95.

In the following review, King offers a mixed review of The Moor's Last Sigh, contending that Rushdie “always manages to write powerfully about the defining issues of our time.”

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...