Rushdie's work draws some of its greatest strength from his ability to join the structure and scope of the "classic" novels of the nineteenth century with attributes of the comic picaresques that preceded them and modernist experiments in narrative form stemming from the ground-breaking work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. In discussing his own influences, he has said that the three novels "lying behind Midnight's Children are Tristram Shandy, The Tin Drum and One Hundred Years of Solitude." These landmark fictions are also clearly predecessors for The Moor's Last Sigh in terms of Laurence Sterne's comic outlook, Gunter Grass's use of a narrative voice, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's employment of magical realism. Rushdie considers the eighteenth century a "great century" in literature, and mentions Henry Fielding's apparently rambling plot in Tom Jones as an example of a book (like The Moor's Last Sigh) in which...