The Moor's last sigh is several things, both inside and outside Salman Rushdie's sprawling new novel. It is the defeated farewell of the last Moorish ruler in Spain, the Sultan Boabdil leaving his beloved Granada in 1492, a year also known for other travels. It is Othello's last gasp of jealousy and violence. It is, in the novel, the name of two paintings depicting Boabdil's departure; and it is what the novel itself becomes, the long, breathless, terminal narration of the asthmatic Moraes Zogoiby, alias 'Moor'. Old Moore's Almanach flickers somewhere here ('Old Moor will sigh no more'), as does Luis Buñuel's dernier soupir (which appears as the Ultimo Suspiro petrol station). Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart were wrong, we learn, to think that a sigh is just a sigh: a sigh could be almost anything, and the name Zogoiby is a version of the Arabic elzogoybi, 'the unlucky one', the sobriquet traditionally attached to Boabdil.

LRB 7 September 1995 | PDF Download