SOURCE: "For Love of Mother," in The Boston Globe, January 14, 1996, p. B43.

In the following review, Caldwell describes The Moor's Last Sigh as "a parable of modern India."

In Salman Rushdie's vast, torrential ode to modern India, the streets are filled with the smells of history: spices and blood and yesterday's tragedies, mingled with the sweet promise of tomorrow's lies. The Moor's Last Sigh is a prodigiously realized, sometimes exhausting novel, cloaked in an elegant satire that barely masks the moral conviction at its center. Its story roams from Bombay to Spain over most of the 20th century, and though its panoply of characters focuses chiefly upon four generations of one Jewish-Christian family, its real protagonist is Mother India. Wrought with passion and anger and a fierce lampoonery that only history's agonies can evoke, The Moor's Last Sigh trains its rapid-fire intelligence on anything that moves.

Conceived with...