SOURCE: "The Prisoner in the Tower," in Newsweek, Vol. CXXVII, No. 2, January 8, 1996, p. 70.

In the following review, the critic describes The Moor's Last Sigh as Rushdie's "passionate, often furious love letter to the country of his birth."

There's an unusually restrained, contemplative episode toward the end of Salman Rushdie's flamboyant new novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, when the narrator finds himself locked up in a tower by a madman intent on murder. The narrator, known as Moor, is helpless. Then a kind of hope begins to stir, thanks to the woman he meets there—a fellow prisoner who is Japanese by birth. "Her name was a miracle of vowels. Aoi Uë: the five enabling sounds of language, thus grouped ('ow-ee oo-ay'), constructed her." By virtue of her quiet strength, "her formality, her precision," this woman becomes his life support and a fount of discipline. Locked up with the...