I think Rushdie can be a bit daunting sometimes because he's really an intellectual through and through. He fills his writing with countless references to mythology and history in a way that I find rewarding but some may find difficult. Rushdie creates the story of a band and music that grows to epic proportions. We follow the story of Rai, a photographer who falls precariously in love with Vina in India while still very much a boy. He basically devotes his whole life to Vina and the language is so strong that by the end, you forget that these characters really are fictional and didn't exist. Ormus, who Vina is also in love with, immediately recalls Freddie Mercury of the band Queen, who has many similarities. The other really engaging thing about this novel is following the characters, especially Rai from India to England to America. The only weakness is how it ends but I can forgive Rushdie this error as the rest of the writing in the novel is incredibly strong. This was the second time I read this one.

I seldom give up on a book, even one that irritates and bores in equal amounts, but this pack of rubbish finally wore me out at about page 250. That was after more than 1 try at making headway and lots of displacement activities to avoid reading any more. In other words, it was a complete waste of time for me and a dull one at that. It has been said that editors were unwilling to make changes to J K Rowling manuscripts because she had so much power and I suspect that the same applies here to Salman Rushdie because this is absolute tripe with story lines that go nowhere and endless pages of twaddle. In fact, in the end there is nothing to recommend it. I left the copy behind in a hotel room so that someone else, perhaps the cleaning staff, would throw it away. Hopefully, they put it in the paper recycle bin so that something useful can be made from the dross. (Purchased secondhand from the Strand Bookstore in NYC)

Although I could not help thinking that the whole novel was heavily inspired by the Lennon/Ono story, I ended up dropping that last mental reservation to dive into the novel. It is true that the similarities are obvious: a couple occupying the forefront of the music scene, a separation, a secluded life in a start apartment in the upper west side and an untimely death leaving the survivor changed forever.... Hmmm! of course, you must add to that a drop of Indian lore and a very big dash of Rushdie's genius for language. All in all, a great book!

3.5 stars. An entertaining, witty, tragic, overly long novel set in the 1960s to 1980s, about Indians, Ormus Cama, a musician, songwriter, and Vina Apsara, a famous and much loved singer with a wild and irresistible voice. Their life stories are written by Rei Merchant, famous Indian photographer and good friend to both at various times in their unusual love affair. Vina had finally agreed to marry Ormus in ten years time.

Lots happen in this novel. Rushdie plays around with historic facts. For example, J F Kennedy is saved from being assassinated in Dallas, John Lennon sings ‘Satisfaction’. Rushdie plays around with real song lyrics, incorporating lines in the narrative. I enjoyed the meat goat industry scam that produced billions in tax breaks.

A must read for Salman Rushdie fans!

This novel was first published in 1999.

Short Take: A 600-page love song to the beauty of impermanence.


If my usual choice of literature is candy, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a 12-course meal, and I consumed it gluttonously, shamelessly, simultaneously wanting to rush to the next bite, and to savor the current taste. The interweavings of myth and music are magic, and every sentence is a poem.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a disorienting mix of a huge conglomeration of stories, and a very small, personal memoir. Rai is a child in Bombay, when he meets Vina Apsara and immediately falls in love with her. Unfortunately, Ormus Cama also meets and falls in love with Vina at around the same time, and it’s Ormus that she chooses. Mostly.

Ormus Cama, born with a dead twin, and later injured terribly in one eye, has glimpses of another world, where he hears the music that will eventually become hit records. And it’s then that we realize that this book doesn’t take place in our world, because the first singer to perform “Heartbreak Hotel” on Ormus’s radio is Jesse Aron Parker.

From there, the story follows Vina and Ormus in their larger-than-life, obsessive, ultimately doomed love affair (which is so entangled with their rock stardom, that it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins) and Rai as the man outside of the frame, who sees the entire picture.

There’s so much story here, folks: a huge cast of characters, a narrative that travels from Bombay to London to Manhattan to Mexico, and an awe-inspiring mix of the myths that shape all of our lives and fantasies.

Seriously, I could write a book about this book.

Rushdie lingers with a loving touch on the temporary, from the city of Bombay under English rule, to that brief moment when Vina met Rai, before she fell for Ormus. Everything is temporary, everything goes away, except for Rai’s photographs, and the truths that they tell are usually the ones that nobody really wants to face.

After Vina’s death, Ormus asks about the site of the earthquake, and Rai replies “It was a wreck, if that’s what you mean… as if you took a picture of beauty and then systematically broke everything in the picture.” Rai also says “Power, like love, most fully reveals its dimensions only when it is irrevocably lost.” And that, I think, is the heart of The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Loss of beauty, love, home, family, sight, freedom, even sanity, all of these things play a part.

There’s a recurring theme of deliberate narrowness of vision: Vina only sees what she wants at any given moment, Ormus is obsessed with his visions of another world (ours), and Rai only sees Vina and his photos.
But most of all, this is a story about stories. Rushdie references so many myths, some by name, others indirectly. Orpheus and Eurydice are the most obvious, but there was also Cassandra, and Tiresias the blind prophet, and Cain and Abel, and Odysseus, and so many others.

Ground is not without its flaws. For one, although most of the prose is really gorgeous (I mean REALLY gorgeous), there can be too much of a good thing. Rushdie has a way with words, no question, but sometimes he seems to over-indulge in his own wit, and a clever play on words turns into a multi-page list of them.

The song lyrics in the book mostly just seem silly. I think that fewer quoted lyrics might have made VTO’s (Ormus & Vina’s group) mega-stardom more understandable. For example “It's not supposed to be this way/but you're not here to put it right/And you're not here to hold me tight/It shouldn't be this way” to me sounds like something an unenthusiastic high schooler would write for a school assignment.

Also, Ormus and Vina are not really fleshed out in any way, despite being two of the main characters. Vina’s only real human quirk is an annoying habit? Of talking with an uptick? Even when she’s trying to say something important? (See? Annoying.) But then I wonder: if the music of our world could cross the barrier to Ormus and Vina’s world, is it possible that the stories of their world crossed the barriers into ours? Is it possible that the reason these characters seem unreal is that they are not “real” people, but rather, the heroes and lovers that we now refer to as myths?

If that’s the case - if they are not to be a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, but rather, the source of the story that’s been handed down for generations, then it makes perfect sense. Even their romance rings false in a number of ways for “real life” but makes perfect sense as a larger than life fiction.

Perhaps I’m giving the author too much credit. Maybe it’s because there’s such a profound level of beauty and obvious skill that I’m willing to overlook and make wild excuses for the missing pieces. I can live with that.
But it isn’t just me. U2 loved this one as well - seriously, look it up.


The Nerd’s Rating: FIVE HAPPY NEURONS (and a sequined bustier. Appropriate for any occasion!)

This was my first Salman Rushdie book. My mom gave me the paperback because she didn't like it. (Not a big surprise, that :P) I? I loved it.

This alternated world being ripped apart by earthquakes, inhabited by the modern-day Eurydice and Orpheus with its rock music and mashed-up songs is a thing of beauty. Music, my friends, changes the world.

Rai voice, the one from a man in love, sometimes jealous, sometimes sure that he will get the girl, is filled with joy and longing and laughter. At times lyrical, at times maniacal, he takes us from Vina's young years to her death and beyond. We see Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara become the biggest rock and roll band of all time, we see them grow apart and, maybe, be reborn. Is this a love story? Maybe, in a way. For me, though, is about our dreams and the way in which we choose to follow them. It's about being who we really are even when we made mistakes and take many detours on the way.

After re-reading, I'm still as much in love with this story as I was when I first read it ♥

Someone gave me this book as a college graduation gift. I never finished it back then, getting swamped with grad school work and pretty much giving up reading for pleasure for eight years. I always wanted to get back to it, but it somehow just sat on my shelf instead.

So, the in wake of the election, when I couldn't seem to focus on any of the books sitting around and knowing what I needed was a deep, involved, long story to get lost in, I picked it up again.

And, as is so often the case in my reading life, this was the book that came along at the right time.

It was interesting to confront myself across that interval. When I started it back then, I had very few cultural and literary references. I probably missed many of the embedded lyrics, puns, and jokes about Hollywood, the music biz, and the world of literature. I didn't even really have that great of a grasp of history (sad, as a newbie history grad student). So this was not my book then. It is my book now. It's a middle-aged book in a beautiful, glorious, sad, complex, declining but hopeful way.

Sometimes the doubling and twinning become overwhelming and overwrought. But then the technique sort of comes back around again in a perfect way (a circle!). Same with the allusions to Greek mythology and its previous uses by thinkers and writers and artists, and the overlaps of myth in general. I'm not sure what it all means to have so many layers layered on. Enrichment? The reminder that certain stories have power and exist in many forms because the details they convey and the messages they offer are somehow universal? Evidence of his extensive knowledge and research? The twins/doubles/allusions punctuate the story. And the otherworld figures who sound real but aren't--it's all very surreal. Elvis Aaron Presley=Jesse Aaron Parker. For the first two thirds of the story, I thought he was just being clever and alternative. But how could the same laws (the same Greek history especially, but also the laws of music, war, fame, and celebrity) apply in an alternative world? But when he finally clarifies this (another part of the doubling), it actually IS clever and alternative and disorienting and original. An allusion that becomes original. Genius.

In my head, Ormus is the Brazilian rocker Caetano Veloso. Flamboyant and experimental, ageing into a deep, poetic middle-age. And they're both skinny and got skinnier.

This year of 2016 has seen so many high-profile deaths--David Bowie, Prince, CASTRO. That's probably always the case: the celebrity deaths of any year reach a certain demographic deeply, while the rest of us go "Huh. Too bad." I think Rushdie captured the feeling of when it's your turn to mourn, to be affected by large-scale events over which you have little control.

The election put us on a very dark timeline. His view of alternative worlds probably resonated with me more right now, feeling a very clear forking of the path of our future as a nation. I feel like Ormus, closing my eye to the reality in which I live, trying to see with the other eye a different place. In his music, HE understands the otherworld is "different," but his listeners and hangers-on hear only "better." So I guess there's that to wrestle with, too.

The only solution is to put forth the effort to make thisworld good. To create, to communicate, to seek love. I think Ormus could get behind that.

Knew it was my favorite book ever as soon as I read it. Read all the others I'd said that about again just to be sure. It was. Rushdie's polyglot wordplay and his gift for pun (Why is it that multi-lingual writers like Rushdie and Nabokov are the most exceptional punsters?) are irrepressible. It's a transcontinental, slightly-fantastical elseworld story in which making music seems the most important thing a person can do. Add to it all the burbling, effusive joy with which Rushdie handles language, and this book is pretty well hand-tailored for me. It's also the only place you'll ever find a shout out for the great poet John Shade.

oops! i did it again. i started it for the third time. and i'm determined to finish and like it [i intend the same thing with ulysses and foucault's pendulum - i'll see about the rest]. if only i could get over the first 100 pages. wish me luck. i can't believe i paid 43.8 RON in 2005 to get this book. well, this might be just another reason for reading it ;)

U2 feat. rushdie wrote a beautiful song based on the book
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ-XKz...

***
24.10.2008

"The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame."

*i'm sort of happy i didn't read the book earlier, i just discovered some cinematographic referrals to fellini, bergman and godard i would have certainly skipped back then.

*i still fail to picture rushdie's art deco (?!) bombay. i can't separate india from malaria, cholera or typhoid.

*rai reminds me of nick carraway narrating gatsby's love story.


26.10.2008

70's Bombay through a photographer's lenses:

"There was too much money, too much poverty, too much nakedness, too much disguise, too much anger, too much vermilion, too much purple. There were too many dashed hopes and narrowed minds. There was far, far too much light."


and a beautiful tribute to  James Joyce ( Ulysses)

"The hanged man and I were alone for a long time. His feet swung not far from my revolted nose and yes I wondered about the heels of his boots yes when I got the ropes off I made myself approach him yes in spite of his pong like the end of the world and the biting insects yes and the rawness of my throat and my eyes sore from bulging as I puked I took hold of his heels one after other yes I twisted the left heel it came up empty but the right heel did the right thing the film just plopped down in my hand yes and I put an unused film in its place from my own boot yes and I could feel his body all perfume and my heart was going like mad and I made my escape with Piloo's fate and my own golden future in my hand yes and to hell with everything I said yes because it might just as well be me as another so yes I will yes I did yes."

27.10.2008

i have the feeling that if i update my reading status more often, i'll finish the book sooner. i already imagine myself reading something light, kinsella or smth similar ;p

so far, i don't like vina's character. dunno why.

30.10.2008

"After a tense initial period during which they sometimes see each other in the evenings, with painfully awkward results, they agree to meet only to rehearse with the other band members, to discuss their finances and to perform. They are never alone together any more, they never eat a meal or take in a movie in each other's company, never phone each other, never go dancing, never feed animals in the zoo, never touch. Like divorced couples, they avoid each other's gaze. Yet, mysteriously they continue to say they are both deeply, irreversibly, forever-and-a-day in love.

What can this mean?

It means they are with each other constantly even while they are apart."
***

No dear, it means that they're both stupid.
Stupid oath. Stupid Ormus for accepting Vina's eccentricities and caprices.

31.10.2008

some final notes:
rushdie is indeed a skillful writer, and his use of language is absolutely beautiful. i liked the many references he made to literature, cinema and mythology, though at some point i was fed up with remarks about orpheus and eurydice.

speaking of the two mythological characters and the multiple connections between them and the larger-than-life characters of ormus and vina, i prefer mortals like rai.

i really don't get why rai and ormus would both worship the ground beneath vina's feet.

i'll reward myself with a whole box of chocolate for finishing this :d

oh, and one final thing: it was the last place where i thought i'd read about ceausescu and targu secuiesc [misspelled târgul-sačuesc] :)

This book is a roller-coaster ride of a love story through the lives and deaths of a series of characters (principally an Indian pair that put Sonny and Cher to shame) with a revised history of rock 'n' roll and world events as a background. It began to wear me down more than a little but I can't say that this was necessarily a bad thing as Salman Rushdie has a lot to say, a graet way of sayinmg it and I was caught between wishing he would cut it short and wishing he could go on forever. If there was any fault in this conversation between author and reader, I'm willing to take the blame for not holding up my end. I can't say he left me hanging nor can I say that he left much in blank; in this book, not all questions can be answered but we can appreciate the mystery if there are a few spaces left in blank. Like a fine meal, it was a story almost too good to end but I'm happy it did.

Отново „хитринките“ на Рушди, както и редовните политически и философски коментари.

Първата една трета ми беше най-интересна. Когато действието се развиваше в Бомбай, всичко беше по-автентично и силно (никой, в��лючително Рушди, не може да скъса с Индия, след като е бил свързан с нея ). Много реалистична представа получих за града Бомбай и хората му от онова време (след Независимостта). Но когато действието се пренесе в Англия и САЩ, интересът ми малко спадна. Последните 100 страници отново ми се сториха силни. А последните 10 страници ме докараха до сълзи – „простих” за всичко по-разтеглено на Рушди в тази книга. Спомних си всички мои любими оцелели и неоцелели рок музиканти и нелеката им съдба (въпреки всеобщото противоположно мнение за розов живот), завладяващата сила на музикалния талант; изплуването на миналото в края на живота; дълбочината на майчината любов (дори от неродна майка) и копнежа за получаване на такава любов от всяко дете (както копнежа за живот с деца); и накрая – въпреки земетръсните вълнения в сърцата ни – как вътрешно всеки се стреми да стъпи на стабилна земя, макар и да не го показва.

От самата любовна история и от представянето на rock’n’roll живота не научих много в основната част на книгата. Може би защото съм чела толкова много рок биографии... Все пак признавам, че беше отделено внимание на особеностите на музиката на двамата главни герои и нейното послание, нещо на моменти даже ми напомняше на Jim Morrison и Pam, а и на толкова други.

Преводачката е вникнала във всички детайли и познава всяка буквичка от книгата – огромен труд!

А авторът – този човек е „свръхерудит”– голяма глава; не просто знания и факти, а дълбоко познаване на история и съвременност, религии, митология, политика, национални особености, чисто хуманни аспекти и собствено виждане по всички тези въпроси/области. Няма да се изненадам, ако има управления/държави, които биха му се сърдили не само заради „Сатанински строфи”, а за всички негови романи.

Други интересни теми освен любовта, родината и рок музиката: свързаността на близнаците, воайорството при фотографията, „сляпата” любов, важната (и за нас) 1989 г., „драмата” Изток – Запад.

Четенето си беше преживяване и пътешествие. С голям плюс – Салман Рушди си играе с думите както винаги.

44-oji XX a. Aukso fondo knyga. Panašu, kad bet kuri šio autoriaus knyga tuoj pat įtraukiama į aukso fondo sąrašą. Tačiau šį autorių reikia mėgti - kaip yra Gabrielio García Márquezo gerbėjų, taip yra ir su šiuo autoriumi. Prie roko muzikos pasaulio įprastinio trikampio – muzika, meilė, mirtis čia reikia pridėti dar vieną žodį - Indija. Gal bohemiškas gyvenimas spinduliuoja laisve visur, bet šioje knygoje yra stiprus indiškas prieskonis. Kol kas man tai geriausia šio autoriaus knyga, atsiprašau, kad tai ne "Šėtoniškos eilės" kaip rašo knygų kritikai ar apdovanojimų teikėjai.