The Moor's Last Sigh

1995, 1996 Vintage Edition
Salman Rushdie
The Moor's Last Sigh
Bought new for $13.00
Worn paperback
D+

This has many of the flaws of Rushdie's Midnight's Children-- grossness, meandering, wasted characters, boring incest, sexism-- but I more frequently (or Moor-frequently, as he would say in his Carrie-Fisher-level wordplay) found myself saying, "Who cares?"  Even the narrator-"hero" says he doesn't care.  As with Midnight's, the older generations have the better stories, but those end up being pointless, too.

I should note that there was a book alphabetically between The Golden Compass and this novel, Roszak's The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, but I was so disgusted with its view of sexuality that I gave up halfway through, figuring it wasn't worth finishing just to post about.  Roszak thought he was bringing out Mary Shelley's feminism but the "heroine" is sexually victimized by almost everyone, including her adoptive mother, a painter.  Then I read this book and the free-spirited mother is a painter who molested her son!  

At that, it's still a better book than Roszak's.  At one point, I was considering giving it a C.  But then I got to Moor's romance with Uma (not Thurman) and she's so obviously manipulating everyone, and only his mother sees through her.  Then Uma dies in a bungled attempt to kill Moor, because even the schemers in this book are idiots.  And then there's Nadia Wadia and an Andalusian dog and on and on, and by the end I was glad Moor was aging at double the normal rate, because he'd have to die eventually.  So, yeah, just like with Carrie Fisher, it's a drop from a C on the earlier novel to a D+ for the second one I own.