"The Moor's Last Sigh"

[fiefoe]

It is taking me a long time to settle into this book. In general, this reader is resistant to family sagas, and Salman Rushdie doesn't make it easy. It's hard to get a proper focus on his vast, crowded and flamboyant canvas:

• whereupon Epifania, frowning, changed her tune: Row, row, row your beau, gently down istream, she sang, perhaps advising Belle to concentrate on her spousely duties, and then added the rather more metaphysical put-down: Morally, morally, morally, morally ... ker-runch! ... wife is not a queen.
• They began to strike attitudes and declaim. In Malayalam, Kannada, Tulu, Konkani, Tamil, Telugu and English they proclaimed the revolution, they demanded the immediate departure of the revanchist poodles of colonialism, the blood-sucking cockroaches of imperialism, to be followed by the common ownership of assets and annual over-fulfillment of rice quotas; their right-hand  index fingers stabbing towards the future while their left fists rested magisterially against their hips. Babeling Lenins, their beards coming loose in the heat, addressed the now-enormous crowd; 
• (The dog was dead too, of course, had been for decades. Aires had had Jaw jaw stuffed, and there were little furniture-wheels screwed into the undersides of his paws, so that his master could continue to pull him along on a lead.)
  

I guess sagas are popular with authors because they get to dictate so many lives, especially messy endings, ever so neatly.

• He contracted the malaria of just desserts, and in spite of being nursed night and day by the Widow Elphinstone, who mopped his brow with the cold compresses of dashed hopes, he sweated mightily, and died.
• ...and then Carmen da Gama launched a daily newspaper aimed at the masses of readers in the seaside fishing-villages and also the rice-villages on the hyacinth- infested backwaters.