The Final Sigh

I finished The Moor's Last Sigh last night after months of picking up, and picking up again. Much of the novel was superb, but the last 50 pages or so, well, I lost patience. It made me think back to Italo Calvino's and Umberto Eco's Norton Lecture Series lectures about enjoying the path, the process, the lingering of reading. But in this case, the story was over when the story left India.

My homework from randomhouse is to consider:

How does Rushdie use the Benengeli section of the novel to explore the theme of parasitism, and do you think that he intends Benengeli to represent the parasitism of the modern world? Rushdie equates Vasco Miranda with Bram Stoker's Dracula; with Helsing, the Larios sisters, and the Benengeli Parasites he makes other references to the Dracula tale. What does he achieve by making this comparison? What does the presence of Aoi U‘ within Vasco's nightmarish castle signify?

Come back later, and maybe I'll have another answer. Otherwise I'll say that the Moor's Last Sigh was cheesecake novel: very rich, and perhaps a bite one too many. Though school is full swing, I am looking forward to another book...