SOURCE: "English as a Wicked Weapon," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 7, 1996, pp. 3, 13.

Below, Eder presents a mixed review of The Moor's Last Sigh.

Why is Moraes Zogoiby, disinherited scion of twin artistic and financial dynasties in Bombay, cowering in a graveyard across from Granada's Alhambra, having escaped from a mad compatriot intent on murdering him? Or, to transmute fiction back into reality, why is Salman Rushdie, twin scion of literature and of a wealthy Indian Muslim family, hiding from a different form of coreligionary murderousness (except when he ventures out for a reception or a ceremony)?

The Moor's Last Sigh is not Rushdie's first fictional reflection on the extremist Muslim death sentence imposed on him for The Satanic Verses. His first effort was a children's tale, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a whimsical allegory in which good adventures magically defeat evil necromancers. No such victory...