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The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie

19 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by Giedre in Fiction

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1990s, 20th century, booker-shortlist, british, historical fiction, indian, magic realism

imageI admit that I had already given The Moor‘s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie a couple of unsuccessful tries before I finally challenged myself to reading it in one go a couple of weeks ago. It seemed just the right time to plunge into something by Rushdie after I unexpectedly met him at a conference he was giving in Madrid as part of the World Book Day celebration.

And yes, it was a big challenge. If one can love and hate a book at the same time, admire and despise it, crave for more and wish to finish it immediately, then I experienced it as well while turning the pages of The Moor‘s Last Sigh. I couldn‘t but admire Rushdie‘s genius, his boundless imagination and his capacity to interweave the lives of the characters of the book and the historical facts into one single fabric full of new colors. And at the same time I hated the slowness of the plot, which became even slower mixed with my incapacity to read Rusdhie‘s ornate language faster.

I loved how the author‘s experienced hand mixed classes, religions, ethnic groups, politics, business, crime and art. And I pitied my lack of knowledge of the historical and political context, which made me miss a lot of allusions and connotations that would have made more sense for somebody living in India.

I was tired of long sentences. And I relished the poetry of the language.

I chose to quote one single sentence, which resumes everything I tried to say in this review, and everything I was not able to express:

“And if the flies buzzed in through the opened netting-windows, and the naughty gusts through the parted panes of leaded glass, then opening of the shutters let in everything else: the dust and the tumult of boats in Cochin harbour, the horns of freighters and tugboat chugs, the fishermen’s dirty jokes and the throb of their jellyfish stings, the sunlight as sharp as a knife, the heat that could choke you like a damp cloth pulled tightly around your head, the calls of floating hawkers, the wafting sadness of the unmarried Jews across the water in Mattancherri, the menace of emerald smugglers, the machinations of business rivals, the growing nervousness of the British colony in Fort Cochin, the cash demands of the staff and of the plantation workers in the Spice Mountains, the tales of Communist troublemaking and Congresswallah politics, the names Gandhi and Nehru, the rumours of famine in the east and hunger strikes in the north, the songs and drum-beats of the oral storytellers, and the heavy rolling sound (as they broke against Cabral Island’s rickety jetty) of the incoming tides of history.”

Give it a try. Or a few. You’ll love it or you’ll hate it. Or both.

Oh, and if you are not sure what a palimpsest is, this book will teach you everything you need to know about it, I promise.

May 2014

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“Waterland” by Graham Swift

09 Friday May 2014

Posted by Giedre in Uncategorized

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1980s, 20th century, booker-shortlist, british, historical fiction

9780330518215After Rushdie‘s “The Moor’s Last Sigh” I could only expect that another family saga will end up in my hands: “Waterland” by Graham Swift. It was my first plunge into Swift’s waters, and I hope that it won’t be the last one. I only regret reading “Waterland” in Lithuanian instead of its original language, and I will not know until I pick up the next book by Swift if my four stars instead of five should be attributed to my not fully identifying with the author’s voice or the translator’s.

“Waterland” is a story about storytelling, a narrative about narration that analyses the meaning and the necessity of history.

“Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man – let me offer you a definition – is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right. Even in his last moments, it’s said, in the split second of a fatal fall – or when he’s about to drown – he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.”

And so the protagonist of the book, Tom, a history teacher in a high school, tells us a story. About the “waterland”, the low-lying fens somewhere in east England. About drainage and beer brewing, madness and murder, coming of age, incest, abortion and childlessness.

Swift suggests that history is cyclical, that any revolution for a better future is always based on a vision or an adapted reflection of a period of prosperity and well-being in the past. That a change leads to another change, which does not always mean progress. That there is also regression and repetition. The Fens, where the biggest part of the story is based, serve Swift as the main metaphor of this cyclicality. Despite centuries of efforts to drain and improve the land in the fens, the water had always found the way to return through rains and floods, bringing disasters to the inhabitants.

Do we all live in the fens of history, I dare to ask? And is there more to it than trying to keep our heads above the water of its recurring floods?

I may or I may not find the answer, but I will keep wondering.

“Your “Why?” gives the answer. Your demand for explanation provides an explanation. Isn’t the seeking of reasons itself inevitably an historical process, since it must always work backwards from what came after to what came before? And so long as we have this itch for explanations, must we not always carry round with us this cumbersome but precious bag of clues called history? Another definition, children: Man, the animal which demands an explanation, the animal which asks Why.”

May, 2014

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