Narrated by Moraes “Moor” Zogoiby, born in 1957, it is the story of his fall from grace in a high-born cross-breed family in which his father is an Indian Jew and his mother, a celebrated artist, is Christian with Portuguese heritage (a descendant of the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama). He commences with his Moorish roots and his great-grandfather, Francisco da Gama; and tells of his three older sisters, “Ina” (Christina), “Minnie” (Inamorata), and “Mynah” (Philomena); his mother; his father; and his lover Uma Sarasvati, the woman who “transformed, exalted, and ruined” his life. The story reveals his “family rifts and premature deaths and thwarted loves and mad passions and weak chests and power and money and the even more morally dubious seductions and mysteries of art,” and, of course, his family scandals. In writing of his family, he “peels off history, the prison of the past.”
Art forms the structure for the novel, mainly because the central character is his mother, the artist Aurora da Gama, whom he worshipped, hated, and finally felt compassion for. The Moor’s Last Sigh refers to one of his mother’s paintings, oil on canvas, completed in 1987. It was her last, unfinished, and unsigned masterpiece.
The novel’s vividness is in the pepper and spices of the tale, set predominantly in Bombay with its Portuguese-English cultural beginnings yet the most Indian of Indian cities. From Bombay, the narrator takes a pilgrimage to his great-grandfather’s roots in an Andalusian village in Spain. The village of Benengeli lies in the Alpujarras, a hill of the Sierra Morena which separates Andalusia from La Mancha. Trying to imagine the village in the time of his ancestry, he discovers it is overrun with dogs and expatriates.
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