The Moor's Last Sigh: Costa Novel AwardKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 16 févr. 2011 - 448 pages NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. “Fierce, phantasmagorical … a huge, sprawling, exuberant novel.” —The New York Times Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave. |
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Abraham Zogoiby Aires artist asked Aurora Zogoiby Baby beauty became began Belle beneath Benengeli Boabdil body Bombay burst Cabral Island called Camoens Carmen Cashondeliveri child Cochin Cochin Jew dance dark dead death Dilly door dreams elephant Elephanta Epifania eyes face father Felicitas fell Flory Gama Ganesha girl hand head heart Henry the Navigator Hindu India invisible Jews Kekoo knew ladies Lambajan litde lives Lobo look lover Mainduck Malabar Hill Minnie Minto Miss Jaya Mogambo Moor Moor's Last Sigh mother Mother India murder Mynah Nadia Wadia Nehru never night once painted Parsi perhaps picture R. K. Laxman Raman Fielding Renegada Sammy Sarasvati secret sister smile spices story tell thing thought told tongue took truth turned Vasco Miranda voice walked walls woman young Zogoiby's
Fréquemment cités
Page 382 - I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.
Page 139 - ... (In another version of the dream I would be able to peel away more than skin, I would float free of flesh, skin and bones, having become simply an intelligence or a feeling set loose in the world, at play in its fields, like a science-fiction glow which needed no physical form.) So, in writing this, I must peel off history, the prison of the past.
Page 82 - You do well," said his more masculine mother, "to weep like a woman, for what you could not defend like a man!
Page 5 - I have lost count of the days that have passed since I fled the horrors of Vasco Miranda's mad fortress in the Andalusian mountain-village of Benengeli; ran from death under cover of darkness and left a message nailed to the door. And since then along my hungry. heat-hazed way there have been further bunches of scribbled sheets, swings of the hammer, sharp exclamations of two-inch nails.
Page 230 - Around and about the figure of the Moor in his hybrid fortress she wove her vision, which in fact was a vision of weaving, or more accurately interweaving. In a way these were polemical pictures, in a way they were an attempt to create a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation; she was using Arab Spain to re-imagine India, and this land-sea-scape in which the land could be fluid and the sea stone-dry was her metaphor idealised?
Page 82 - Boabdil's coming-to-an-end, felt it as his own. Breath left his body with a whine, and the next breath was a gasp. The onset of asthma (more asthma! It's a wonder I can breathe at all!) was like an omen, a joining of lives across the centuries, or so Abraham fancied as he grew into his manhood and the illness gained in strength. These wheezing sighs not only mine, but his. These eyes hot with his ancient grief.
Page 34 - To me, the doublenesses in Grandfather Camoens reveal his beauty; his willingness to permit the coexistence within himself of conflicting impulses is the source of his full, gentle humaneness. If you pointed out the contradictions between, for example, his egalitarian ideas and the olympian reality of his social position, he would answer with no more than an owningup smile and a disarming shrug. 'Everyone should live well, isn't it,
Page 41 - Year by year England sends out fresh drafts for the first fighting-line, which is officially called the Indian Civil Service. These die, or kill themselves by overwork, or are worried to death, or broken in health and hope in order that the land may be protected from death and sickness, famine and war, and may eventually become capable of standing alone. It will never stand alone, but the idea is a pretty one, and men are willing to die for it, and yearly the work of pushing and coaxing and scolding...