Yet another wonderful feast for thought from Salman Rushdie. "Ground beneath her feet" is a long and lingering trip through the lives of 3 people, through their respective journeys of self discovery and personal tragedy.

To me, this book is more than just a love story, it is a thesis on how in modern day (largely) godless world, we take the cult celebrity figures and turn them into the pagan gods of old. Not the perfect beings far off in the sky, but the angry, nymphomaniac, jealous, obstinate gods of the Greek and Indian pantheons. They are gods, but also men and women, their divinity magnifying all that is human about them to gargantuan proportions.

In this case, the object of celebration and obsession is Vina Aspara. A thoroughly vapid and selfish woman by all accounts, yet one that inspires such deep and unquestioning devotion that all that come across her wish for nothing more than to worship the ground beneath her feet.

Greek mythology runs rampant throughout the book. Ormus is Jason, while Vina his Argo, sailing the stormy seas of rock and roll with "Cholchis Records", getting thoroughly fleeced in the process. Rai is the lowly Pan, an artist in his own way, but forever lost in Apollo's shadow. Ormus and Vina are dualities of Apollo/Orpheus and Persephone/Euridice. Except that Vina takes the Euridice myth and turns it upside down. Instead of being rescued from the underworld by her lover, she rescues him from life and takes him with her back to the underworld.

The imagery of twins (Castor and Pollux, one human - other divine) make constant appearances. Ormus and Gayomart, Virus and Cyrus, Vina and Mira. Even the universe itself has a twin, the mysterious otherworld, mirroring the twin-set of realities that exist inside and outside the pages of the book. The biggest surprise is that love is presented as the mirror twin of death. Where neither one can be separated from the other.

The storyline is a bit wavering, turning from the mundane to the fantastic at a drop of a hat. The plot line itself is almost non-existent, as the point of the book seems to be less about telling a coherent story, than about the authors endless monologues on the nature of anything from photography to architecture to love. Having said that, the writing itself is nothing short of superb. The characters are so intensely real, they practically leap out of the page.

To sum up, this book is a sublime whirlwind, that tosses you from side to side, leaves you completely confused yet profoundly altered. It left me breathless.

That's a strange and overflowing novel that plunges us into the destiny of an imaginary rock group whose two leaders, united and torn by an incredible love story, will gradually change the face of the world.
The story is precious for the pinch of fantasy. The author has sprinkled it, the group's inspiration being in contact with a mysterious parallel dimension that gradually invades the story.
In the end, a book is worth the detour, especially for what we learn about India, but it is not always easy, especially in the last hundred pages, which drag on in length.

Lange lag das Buch ungelesen im Regal. Gekauft hatte ich es mir damals eigentlich nur, weil U2 aus einer Textpassage einen Song gebastelt haben ("The Ground Beneath Her Feet" vom Million Dollar Holte OST). Doch Salman Rushdie gilt nicht umsonst als wichtiger und grossartiger Autor. Denn auch diese Geschichte um die Fiktive Band VTO und die Dreiecksbeziehung zwischen dem Duo in der Band und einem Fotografen ist lyrische Reichhaltigkeit vom Feinsten.

Rushdie lässt die Erzählung und gewählten Sätze genial ineinander fliessen, offenbart ein schier endloses Wissen der menschlichen Geschichte und Sagen, und vollendet das Buch mit glaubwürdigen Beschreibungen der Musik. Manchmal etwas sehr blumig und über zu viele Umwege, doch gegen Ende verdichtet sich alles zu einer erdrückenden Intensität. Unbeschreiblich.

Und jetzt will ich mir "Earthquake Songs" anhören!

Not my favorite Rushdie novel, but enjoyable still.

Just one word: WEIRD

2.5⭐️

This kind of dragged on for me. I wasn’t invested in Vina’s or Rai’s characters for the majority of the book, and the story didn’t pick up until it was almost over. That being said, I may have enjoyed it more if I’d been more familiar with the story of Orpheus. Rushdie’s writing was beautiful as always, so not a bad read.

Rushie sir, I love you so please don't mind me giving this book Three stars :)

"Those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainly, 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 playhouse or a movie theater, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces 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.” -The ground beneath her feet.

This book is extraordinary till 70% of its length and at last it tumble down for its staleness ... Out of 576 page anyhow I managed to read 450 pages and it took me around 4 months reading last hundred pages... Giving up in a mid-way as it stopped making any sense onward. The same story, fro and to and to and fro and the pendulum unnecessarily swings so better to put full stop.

Ok, ok, I know Rushdie has an obvious gift for language, and almost no one can create a better pun, but this "retelling of the Orpheus myth via an alternate-reality alternative-history of rock n' roll" (whew) left me decidedly un-gripped. As other readers have discovered, almost all of the characters are unlikeable. Vina, the rock goddess who is supposedly adored by the world, is self-centered and execrable, her endlessly cuckolded husband/virtuoso guitarist Ormus Cama is a dope, and Rai the narrator is annoying in his inexplicable obsession with Vina. I actually wish I could've given the book 2 and a half stars. I really wanted to like this story, and at times I did. I enjoyed the way that Rushdie had "their" world and "ours" occasionally cross paths and dip into each other, and his various references to mythology and people in the music industry from the 60's to the 80's were fun to spot. However, when he tried to write about music itself, the business and stardom, I wasn't really convinced. Legs McNeil, he ain't.

Orpheus and Eurydice as rock stars. Epic tale of music 'n' love.
And the deification of genius.

n  n

Also, highlights celebrity's recent secularisation. How today's stars function for community instead of idolatry.

"the point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire... Now that they've gone, the high drama's over. What remains is ordinary human life."

I honestly was bored just a few pages into this one. I don't even remember finishing it. I think that as much as I loved The Satanic Verses, Midnight's Children, and The Moor's Last Sigh as well as Jaguar Nights, Imaginary Homelands, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories, his other fiction just has not had the power to pull me in as much into his universe. Apparently, I am not the only one on GR to have been underwhelmed by this one so it will sink low on my to-be-read-again-when-I-am-retired-and-read-everything-else-on-my-tbr list.

*3,5

Excelente. Recomendo.