Tot drie maal toe ben ik dit boek herbegonnen alvorens het uit te lezen.
En daarna niet begrijpen waarom dit zo lang geduurd heeft... want dit boek is goed, heel goed, zeker niet het meeste gekende boek van Rushdie, maar imho het beste wat ik tot nu toe van Rushdie gelezen heb!

Dugo smo se vukle ova knjiga i ja. Pročitala sam je sa ogromnom pažnjom, upijajući svaku rečenicu.
Nije bilo lako. Ruždi je veliki intelektualac, gotovo zastrašujuće koliko veliki. Njegova moć da barata riječima i jezicima je zadivljujuća.
Ima neobične reference na mitologiju, istoriju, književnost, muziku, tako lijepo uklopljene u cjelokupnu priču koju je stvorio: o porodičnim vezama i odnosima, ljubavi, muzici (kao centru svijeta), osloncima u životu, vjeri... Ne znam ni sama, zbrkane su mi misli nakon svih ovih stranica, ali je utisak koji je ostavila na mene snažan.
Takođe, način na koji prati likove, kako Raia (naratora), tako kroz njegove oči i sve ostale, je fascinantan. Provlači ih kroz filtere mitologija i bogova (grčke, hinduističke, budističke), igra se njihovim psihičkim profilima, natjera vas da pogledate iz drugog ugla - da razumijete i čak opravdate u svojim očima serijskog ubicu, suočava ih sa porodičnim demonima, politikom, a pored svega toga, izdiže ih iznad svega i uči nas ljepoti ljubavi, kada joj se pristupi otvorenog srca.

"Dugo sam verovao da u svakoj generaciji ima nekoliko duša, nazovite ih srećnicima ili prokletima, koje su prosto rođene tako da ne pripadaju, koje dolaze na svet poluodvojene, ako hoćete, bez čvrste veze sa porodicom ili mestom ili nacijom ili rasom; da možda ima na milione, milijarde takvih duša, možda isto toliko nepripadajućih koliko i pripadajućih. Jer su oni koji cene stabilnost, koji se plaše prolaznosti, neizvesnosti, promena, podigli moćan sistem stigmi i tabua protiv neukorenjenosti, te razarajuće antidruštvene sile, tako da se uglavnom prilagođavamo, pretvaramo se da nas motivišu vernost i solidarnost koje u stvari ne osećamo, krijemo svoje tajne identitete ispod lažne kože onih identiteta koji su odobreni pečatom "pripadajućih". Ali, istina procuri u naše snove; dok smo sami u krevetu (jer noću smo potpuno sami, čak i ako spavamo sa nekim), vinemo se, letimo, bežimo. A u budnim sanjama koja naša društva dozvoljavaju, u našim mitovima, umetnostima, pesmama, slavimo nepripadajuće, drugačije, odmetnike, čudake."

"Pošto si čitavog života živeo u šumi, ne vidiš drveće."

"Mi smo imali tu privilegiju da izbliza posmatramo neke od najboljih - najbolje među najboljima – članove plejade slavnih varalica. Stoga, nas nije lako impresionirati, mi od svojih javnih lupeža zahtevamo varanje na najvišem nivou. Videli smo i previše, a ipak hoćemo da nas nasmeju i da u neverici zavrtimo glavom; oslanjamo se na prevarante da probude naše čuđenje, uspavano preteranošću našeg svakodnevnog života."

"Najbolje u našoj prirodi utopilo se u najgorem."

"Ubistvo je krivično delo nasilja prema ubijenoj osobi. Samoubistvo je krivično delo nasilja prema onima koji ostaju živi."

"Ako nemate sopstvenu sliku sveta, ne znate kako da pravite izbore – materijalne, bezvezne ili moralne. Ne znate šta je gore, a šta dole, da li odlazite ili dolazite, niti u kom grmu čuči zec."

"...a kad god nestane neko ko vas je poznavao, izgubite jednu verziju sebe. Vizija u njegovim očima, njegov sud o vama. Oni koji nas poznaju stvaraju nas, bilo da je u pitanju ljubavnik ili neprijatelj, majka ili prijatelj, i njihovi različiti doživljaji nas samih bruse stranice naše ličnosti, poput nekog oruđa za obradu dijamanta. Svaki takav gubitak jedan je korak bliže grobu, gde se sve verzije stapaju i završavaju."

I’d never read Rushdie before. I can see why he has a Jihad against him — even in this book which only incidentally addresses religion, he is not shy about saying he sees no place for it. But that is beside the point. Rushdie is, truly, a brilliant writer.

The story is something about two kids from India who grow up to form the biggest rock and roll band of all time in some sort of closely-allied alternate reality, outselling even the Beatles. The themes are much wider ranging. There is the love of music and art, the strange workings of culture and politics, the sense of belonging or being an outsider, and finally, in the end, a love triangle. Pretty standard literary stuff, I suppose, but there’s a lot in there. In some sense it’s all in there. He talks about everything. It’s breathtaking. And the language is lovely, poetry all the way through.
There’s a sly humour through the whole thing as well, visible most clearly through the alternate reality he creates, where “Jesse Parker” wrote Heartbreak Hotel, Madonna is a music critic, and JFK survived the assassination attempt (there’s also a crazy novel called “Watergate” where Nixon is thrown out of office for bugging the democrats.) Actually, more precisely, the novel is set in two parallel universes, one of which is our own and gradually fades throughout the story to become just another possibility that didn’t happen.

Otherwise, I really don’t know how to describe this book. It’s pretty damn amazing, one of the finest works I’ve ever read, both in terms of scope and execution. Rushdie is incredibly in touch with very many things, both academic (mythology, film theory) and popular (music, politics, Bombay street life) and as a result his novel is real and complete in a way I find deeply inspiring.

I’m going to end by quoting a passage that I found particularly resonant, perhaps the only time I’ve ever seen a deep part of myself expressed well in words:

For a long while I have believed … that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as “natural” a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a play-house or movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our places of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveler, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.

No sooner did we have ships than we rushed to sea, sailing across oceans in paper boats. No sooner did we have cars than we hit the road. No sooner did we have airplanes then we zoomed to the furthers corners of the globe. Now we year for the moon’s dark side, the rocky plains of Mars, the rings of Saturn, the interstellar deeps. We send mechanical photographers into orbit, or on one-way journeys to the stars, and we weep at the wonders they transmit; we are humbled by the mighty images of far-off galaxies standing like cloud pillars in the sky, and we give names to alien rocks, as if they were our pets. We hunger for warp space, for the outlying rim of time. And this is the species that kids itself it likes to stay at home, to bind itself with--what are they called again? ”ties"

Another one I have to thank Annie for. She would rave and rave about this book, and I finally bought a cheap copy at the Beijing bookstore. Every sentence Rushdie writes in this book is close to perfect. I don't know how he sustained it for so many pages. It covers pretty much every major literary theme somewhere, and manages to be at once wholly in the time period it describes, and outside of it. Everything disintegrates like a sugar cube in a glass of cold water as it goes on. Just a phenomenal literary accomplishment.

Salman Rushdie is a total blowhard....he really needed an editor. His prose just goes on and on and on. I wanted to throw this book against the wall. I was forced to read it for a bookclub I was in years ago. No thanks!

Critics have said that this book is "Rushdie's Love Song to America." I think that's printed on the cover of my copy. Eh. The point that I got from it was that was that mixed, generic, international culture spreads in different ways. Among celebrities who reach out toward an international audience, and travel across borders frequently, it develops and mushes together quickly. Among the rest of us, it can take many trips, years, and acquaintances from around the world to see the world as one big place.

Rushdie also did a cool job modeling this book after the myth or Orpheus in Hades. I think it's a perfect read if you quit reading about 30 pages from the end, at which point, just in my opinion, it goes from sublime to lame. The rest is totally worth the effort.

În fața unui asemenea roman, nu poți decât să rămâi împietrit și fascinat, ca un copil ce ascultă o poveste înainte de culcare. Narațiunea bogată în moarte, dominare, supunere, multiculturalism, dorință, distrugere, gelozie, erotism (pe rând materializat și platonic), confuzie și fantastic ne dezvăluie magicul unei lumi în continuă schimbare. Cei trei piloni care susțin întreaga istorie sunt fotografia, muzica și cutremurul, iar personajele (efecte nefaste ale trecutului, fantome ce bântuie agresiv fiecare pagină) sunt experimentele unei culturi și integrarea acestora în globalizare.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet has so much of everything. An epic coming of age and then rock and roll story that spans the second half of the twentieth century. A fusion of Greek and Indian myths with some others, even as far afield as Aztec, thrown into the mix. An alternate history where Kennedy wasn’t assassinated in 1963, Nixon was only President in a novel, and all of the rock songs and artists are scrambled. This alternate history exists in a parallel universe divided by a membrane with one visionary rock writer and artist, Ormus Cama, who can see across them. Oh, and he has a long-standing love story with Vina Apsara which starts when they meet in a record store when she is age 12 and continues through their career as a rock duo and her disappearance in an earthquake. All of this wryly observed by photographer and “event junkie” Rai Merchant who also plays the role of the third vertex of the love triangle. Oh and did I mention, some characters from previous Rushdie novels making their appearances as well. All this and much, much more. Plus an incessant stream of literary goose eggs (Don Quixote by Pierre Ménard!). Earthquakes. Impersonators, so many impersonators. Twins. Puns and wordplay.

And while there is a certain amount of politics in the book, a bit more in depth on Indian politics and the Gandhi’s, sterilization and the like, the book seems more expressive of Rushdie’s love of art, language and myth as transcending ideology and politics, a view the narrator expresses: “Darius Cama’s library of myths is as close as I have ever needed to get to fantasy. The old religions’ legacy of living stories—the Ash Yggdrasil, the Cow Audumla, Ouranos-Varuna, Dionysus’s Indian jaunt, the vain Olympians, the fabulous monsters, the legion of ruined, sacrificed women, the metamorphoses—continues to hold my attention; whereas Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Marxism, the Market, utterly fail to enthrall. These are faiths for the front pages, for CNN, not for me. Let them struggle over their old and new Jerusalems! It’s Prometheus and the Nibelungs, Indra and Cadmus, who bring me my kind of news. Additionally, ever since my youngest days, Ormus and Vina have added to my plate two goodly extra dollops of living myth. These have been more than enough for me.”

At times I felt like calling everyone I know to tell them they should drop everything and read this miraculous explosion of imagination and language. At other times I was hating Rushdie for seemingly refusing an editor and taking his magical material and adding much to much to the point of making it a hot mess. Overall the best parts are great enough that I am very glad I read it—but not positive I would recommend to everyone.

I walked away from this book with many feelings, but, principal among them was boredom. I have seen a lot of people labelling Tolkein's work as self indulgent. Tolkein, my friends, was lyrical. His book had heart, soul. His characters were weighed down by destiny and the strength of their choices. Rushdie, in the other hand, is self indulgent.
I have read The Moor's Last Sigh, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath her Feet by Rushdie and this was the book that let me down. It had nothing of the erudite restraint of the Moor's Last Sigh, the magical realism and haunting mysticism of Shalimar the Clown, the quirky historical mystery of The Enchantress of Florence, or the delicious ambiguity of The Satanic Verses. The Ground Beneath her Feet is a rant, Rushdie's attempt at retelling a great love story. It has its moments, but, overall - it falls hard and fails to land on its feet.
The story revolves around the tumultous relationship between Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara, two musical prodigies whose lives are intertwined irreversibly. Shadowing them, sometimes friend and oftentimes jealous voyeur is Umeed Rai Merchant, photographer and a man hopelessly in love with Vina himself. He narrates the story and is Rushdie's manic voice transmitted onto the page.
The story is an attempt at reworking the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in a more contemporary setting, Vina is damaged goods and Ormus is unloved by his parents and brought up in an India in the throes of post colonial reinvention. The first half of the book is the best and most moving part of this journey. Set entirely in a Bombay filled with Englishmen, Colonial sympathisers and anglicized Parsi Patriarchs Rushdie's magic is truly apparent as I was unable to stop reading the book for the first 300 odd pages. Rushdie seems comfortable writing about his country of birth and of the city he favours most - Bombay. The heartache seems to resonate from the pages as a vindication of the agony of his forced exile. This part also deals with a lot of amazing characters who you learn to love. And then - (if I may use the name of one of the chapters in the book) comes 'The Whole Catastrophe'
This book is too myriad and jumbled to give you a proper summary of the plot. Characters step in and out and there are the standard ridiculous coincidences and the heavy foreshadowing that Rushdie is famous for. However, as soon as the action steps over to England and America, he loses the reader. Perhaps he is not as comfortable writing about these places, perhaps he just doesn't have the knack of making these foregn climes as attractive as the coast of Maharashtra - for whatever the reason, once the action shifts, the book nosedives and never completely recovers.
And there was the science fiction. Rushdie seems to have added some of his musings from his most hallucinogen induced dreams. Sure, the entire subplot of the time-space continuum is a metaphor for the unstable times we live in where contradictions supplant our daily fare. Sure, Rushdie has a long history of superpower imbued and troubled heroes. Sure, it is even a little diverting, interesting to see how all this pans out. And then, in the end - Nothing. No cataclysm, no catastrophe, no proper tying up of the threads of that particular subplot. Just a wispy wraith on a chair giving an astral message and the plot is erased.
This book is unstable, forgetting important characters for a long period of time, giving space to characters who are moping and self indulgent (read Vina and Ormus). The lead pair was a tad annoying, and , considering they take up most of the space of the book, I was extremely ticked off for the major part.
And there is the question of love. Rushdie impresses upon the reader the importance of the 'Love' that Vina and Ormus shared. Call me old fashioned but there is no love without fidelity and Vina dabbles in infidelity so rampant it makes Madonna look like a nun. This entire concept of love being more than shared bodies might appeal to some but not to me. Love is fidelity. Period. Ormus Cama embodies this much more than Vina Apsara ever does in this book, all Vina seems to love is herself.
The ending is too contrived, and too forced to make an impression. It brought to mind the amazing ending scene in the World According to Garp by John Irving with none of the emotional whallop that moment packed. By the time you reach the last few 100 pages, the amazing and very real world of Post Colonial Bombay in the beginning of the book seems like a wonderful dream and the crazy pop culture inspired name dropping rant in the final pages, which seems to go nowhere, is just tedium.
Nuff said I suppose - Mr. Rushdie, if you want to impress us, it takes a lot more than just clever wordplay.

My third Rushdie book - it's good, but of course different from Midnight's Children or The Satanic Verses.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet in reviews is always touted as the first novel by Rushdie written about America. The book jacket describes it as a "gift" to America. Not to be one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I wonder if the blurb writer who wrote that actually ever read the book. I would use the word "critique" rather than "gift". But it's a "critique" that, not surprisingly, was better received than the "gift" of The Satanic Verses to the Muslem world. In other words, there's perhaps a bit less to get insulted about... or perhaps a bit more.

The novel follows the intersecting lives of three characters: two lovers who form a rock band that becomes even bigger than the Beatles or the Stones, and their childhood friend, a photographer who captures not only their images, but also the standard images of the photojournalist covering news (i.e. catastrophes and wars) around the world. The story is about their love story, but it's also about culture, it's about revising history (political, rock & roll, even literary), and also a critique/celebration of the immigrant experience and international politics. It's also about the upheavals in our lives (embodied in the earthquakes of the novel) that forever change our lives.

Told by a photographer, the novel is surprisingly scant in visual trompe d'oeil, or cinematic scenes, though there are a few. His secrets, his involvement in the story, and the history that he describes - similar yet different from our own - make him a highly unreliable narrator, and the ending thus seems just a bit too pat. I found myself wondering what he was hiding.

I found the first hundred or so pages a bit rough going... and was unimpressed with the ending, but in between, the skill of a the writer and his play with cultural referents and how we use them to make meaning are absolutely delightful. They are so plentiful that no one will get them all, but that's okay, it's clear the writer is playing and when you're reading it's easy to be convinced to go along for the ride.

Well. This baggy monster was certainly a giant step down from everything else Salman Rushdie has written. I happened upon a review that quite magically expressed my sentiments about the novel, with great specificity.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...

Up until now, I thought the man could do no wrong. I didn't love his autobiography, but I gave him a pass on that. It's a different type of writing. But this was a giant flop, redeemed only slightly by some beautiful, Rushdie-esque passages early in the book about Bombay, and a few sections here and there that soar above the rest. But mostly it was laborious, and (I have to say) masturbatory. A great writer indulging in his gift and beating his favorite dead-horse themes to death without much of a story. Waste.

I’ve been in the mood for a good love story for a while now, but those are hard to come by.  Authors write constantly about sex, infatuation, heartache, jealousy, and romantic boredom, but those are just some of love’s attendants, never the real thing. In fact, I think the last true love story I read was The Song of Achille’s, which I thought a lot about while reading The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie. Maybe because love, real love, is mythic, but also, maybe because it is not. "Life's bruises demythologise us all." Love, that irrevocable, rending thing, is pathetic. It’s humiliating, sticky, grotesque, it’s comprised of grand gestures and a million moments of mere dust, and it is boundless, wholly unconstrained. It’s not pleasant. And this is the reality Rushdie lays bare, the brutal realities of what it is to love another person, interspersed with his own, gentler musings on what it is to love and lose a country, on which Rushdie is something of an authority. Rushdie renders every facet of this novel with utter perfection - from the terraces of Bombay (still drunk on independence) to the pirate radio ships off the Essex coast to the seedy chic Village artist lofts- that I am there, just as he is. And Vina, Ormus, and Rai are with me long after their final chapter, just as they are with each other, even after the ground has swallowed them and they are nothing but stardust and worm food.  
...
"Suppose the earth just got sick of our greed and cruelty and vanity and bigotry and incompetence and hate, our mur ders of singers and other innocents. Suppose the earth itself grew uncertain about us, or rather made up her mind just to open her jaws and swallow us down, the whole sorry lot of us. As once Zeus destroyed the human race with a flood, and only Deucalion survived to repopu late the earth's surface with beings no worse or better than the dead."