The Ground Beneath Her Feet - Hardcover

Rushdie, Salman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224044192 ISBN 13: 9780224044196

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

At the beginning of this overwhelming novel, Vina Aspara, a famous and much-loved singer, is caught up in a devasting earthquake and never seen again by human eyes. This is her story, and that of Ormus Cama, the lover who finds, loses, seeks and again finds her, over and over, throughout his own extraordinary life in music. The story of a love that stretches across their whole lives, and even beyond death. Their epic romance is narrated by Ormus's childhood friend and Vina's sometime lover, her "back-door man", the photographer Rai, whose astonishing voice, filled with stories, images, myths, anger, wisdom, humour and love, is perhaps the books true hero. Telling the story of Ormus and Vina, he finds that he is also revealing his own truths: his human failings, his immortal longings. He is a man caught up in the loves and quarrels of the age's goddesses and gods, but dares to have ambitions of his own. And lives to tell the tale. Around these three, the uncertain world itself is beginning to tremble and break. Cracks and tears have begun to appear in the fabric of the real. There are glimpses of abysses below the surfaces of things. In the words of one of Ormus Cama's songs, it shouldn't be this way. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is Salman Rushdie's most gripping novel and his boldest imaginative act.

About this title

Review:

Starting with the now classic Midnight's Children, voted the Booker of Bookers, followed by Shame, The Satanic Verses and the triumphant The Moor's Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie has established himself as one of the most compelling storytellers in contemporary fiction. Throughout Rushdie's writing runs the belief that without the democratic, irreverent, subversive playfulness of stories, we lose our sense of humanity and identity and sink into the nightmare of history which his novels so powerfully indict. The pursuit of such beliefs has of course left a lasting impact on Rushdie himself, from the violent response to his indictment of Pakistani politics in Shame to the response of Islamic fundamentalism to The Satanic Verses, to which Rushdie's ultimate response was the deeply moving study of religious and cultural tolerance in The Moor's Last Sigh. The Ground Beneath Her Feet sees Rushdie one again pillaging the founding myths and stories of East and West from which he creates an astonishing parable of the ways in which, as the title itself suggests, even the ground beneath our feet is not as stable as we might like to think.

Rushdie has always been fascinated by contemporary culture and in particular cinema, most brilliantly evoked in Shame and his non-fiction. The Ground Beneath Her Feet finds Rushdie immersed in the world of rock 'n' roll, so successfully that one of the novel's spinoffs has been the recording of Rushdie's lyrics by U2. Vina Apsara, Greek-American trash, and Ormus Cama, son of a disillusioned Bombay lawyer and Anglophile, meet in 1950s Bombay, creating one of the most tortuous but enduring rock partnerships which spans the next 40 years. With Rushdie's usual breathtaking panache, the story of their families and histories unfold as the narrative develops, recounted by Umeed Merchant, aka Rai, photographer and sometime lover of Vina. Rai recounts the on-off relationship between Vina and Ormus as he moves across the trouble-spots of the world, photographing upheavals and atrocities, before securing the ultimate final picture of Vina, swallowed by the earthquake which opens the book, and which recurs throughout the novel like the guitar riffs which the baby Ormus plays as he first emerges from the womb.

Cannibalising the stories of classical history, the novel offers an updating of the myth of Orpheus, the greatest of all musicians, and his doomed wife, Eurydice. Transmuted from Greece, via India, and thrown into the postmodern world of rock and roll, Rushdie weaves a magical narrative of the melding of East and West, in song and in story, as the novel careers across the globe. From a wonderfully comic portrayal of London in the swinging sixties, to the sex and drugs and rock n roll of New York in the seventies, Rushdie's canvas grows more ambitious than ever, held together by the love triangle of Vina, Ormus and Rai and its final tragic unravelling, as the ground moves beneath their feet in one final ironic twist.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet finds Rushdie at the height of his powers, exploring love, loss, migration, displacement and the seismic effects of cultural difference. As one of the many songs that Rushdie weaves into his story goes, "I know it's only rock n roll, but I like it." --Jerry Brotton

Review:

"No novelist currently writing in English does so with more energy, intelligence and allusiveness than Rushdie. Nearly every page of "The Ground Beneath Her Feet "offers something to arrest a devoted reader's attention: puns and wordplays galore . . . and enough literary echoes--of Joyce, Yeats, Frost, Dante, oh hell, of nearly everybody--to keep graduate students on the prowl through these pages for years."--Paul Gray, " Time"
No novelist currently writing in English does so with more energy, intelligence and allusiveness than Rushdie. Nearly every page of "The Ground Beneath Her Feet "offers something to arrest a devoted reader's attention: puns and wordplays galore . . . and enough literary echoes--of Joyce, Yeats, Frost, Dante, oh hell, of nearly everybody--to keep graduate students on the prowl through these pages for years. "Paul Gray, Time""

"No novelist currently writing in English does so with more energy, intelligence and allusiveness than Rushdie. Nearly every page of The Ground Beneath Her Feet offers something to arrest a devoted reader's attention: puns and wordplays galore . . . and enough literary echoes--of Joyce, Yeats, Frost, Dante, oh hell, of nearly everybody--to keep graduate students on the prowl through these pages for years." --Paul Gray, Time

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0224044192
• ISBN 13: 9780224044196
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 592