SOURCE: "Writing to Save His Life," in Time, Vol. 147, No. 3, January 15, 1996, pp. 70-1.

In the following review, Gray finds The Moor's Last Sigh's "leisurely wordiness is a mark of Rushdie's mastery."

Near the end of The Moor's Last Sigh, a madman holds the novel's narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, prisoner. The captor, an old but rejected friend of Zogoiby's late, flamboyant mother, demands a history of her family before killing its teller. "He had made a Scheherazade of me," Moraes writes. "As long as my tale held his interest he would let me live."

Coming from Salman Rushdie, the notion of a man writing under a death sentence takes on a certain poignance. And the temptation exists, since he is the West's most prominent enforced recluse, to read everything he has written since the Ayatullah Khomeini's infamous fatwa in 1988 as a comment on his personal dilemma. But The Moor's...