The Moor's Last Sigh

"This book is one of my favourites of his, a real family saga with strong connective tissue between generations, an ambitious and brave story; it’s exuberant with colour and passion, and at times laugh-out-loud funny. There are the all the inevitable themes that are paired displacement: ethnicity, religion and—harking back to Barbara Kingsolver’s book—fanaticism, which of course is so close to Rushdie’s own personal experience. Art is also big in this one—and love. The story is about an asthmatic boy called Moraes Zogoiby. He’s the moor of the title. Moraes is in exile, he travelled from India to Spain, and that is one displacement. This type of exile is personal to me, too. My mother’s family escaped from what is now the Czech Republic, formerly Czechoslovakia. They had to escape in the 1940s from Communism, and left behind love and acrimony and the complications of family. So I really found resonance there on a personal level. In leaving India, Moraes leaves behind love, of course, as well as all the family chaos, full of curses and prescribed destinies. Blood is absolutely thicker than water in this tome; the strength of family ties, how you can’t escape them; how you remember; how you long for what you no longer have. It’s fascinating: that tussle, that weighing up, that complicated overturning of your family history Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The ‘last sigh’ refers to Moraes’ own medical condition, his asthma, but also is a riff on where he is in Spain, name checking the last sigh of the defeated Moors as they left Alhambra, Granada. It includes concisely some incredible geographical shifts, changes in world order and spheres of influence. I hope my book captures some of that too. Rushdie’s book is part set in India, in Cochin—just across the country from Chennai, formerly Madras, where Song’s boat docks, by the way—and Rushdie parallels the declining Portuguese empire in southern India with the declining Moorish Islamic empire in Spain. This dismantling of structural hierarchies is so strong in this novel. That is what I’m aspiring to do in Song too. To explore these structures and hierarchies set up by British colonialists, the weighing up of assimilation versus subjugation versus a jockeying of power."