Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #87648 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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

Synopsis
At the beginning of this stunning novel, Vina Apsara, a famous and much-loved singer, is caught up in a devastating 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. Their epic romance is narrated by ormus's childhood friend and Vina's sometime lover, the photographer Rai. 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. This is Salman Rushdie's boldest imaginative act, a vision of our shaken, mutating times, an engagement with the whole of what is and what might be, and account of the intimate, flawed encounter between the East and the West, a brilliant remaking of the myth of Orpheus.

From the Publisher
'This is a fabulous, glowing, witty and brilliant epic...This is the Ulysses of rock 'n' roll...glittering writing - humane and very funny' Ruth Padel, Independent

Customer Reviews

He ain't heavy, he's Salman Rushdie!
Highly entertaining and thought provoking. In the Ground Beneath her Feet, Rushdie brilliantly examines the distinction between reality and our socially-skewed perception of it. By using the most artificial modern-day construct, Rock 'n'Roll, as a metaphor for society, Rushdie underlines the fragility of cultural existence.

But if you can't be doing with semiology, The Ground Beneath Her Feet also provides a rollicking tour through popular culture. With witty associations and an abundant imagination, Rushdie comes up with a very enjoyable way to spend a few hours.

Not perfectly stitched together, but pretty thread.
I'm new to Great Modern Literature (the closest thing I've read is Kate Atkinson), but this served as a fine introduction, as the dominating subject matters are familiar enough for the reader to get to grips with the style. In agreement with other reviewers, it's not one to read in small sections - though it can be taken a chapter at a time, I got my greatest enjoyment when reading 150 pages in a single sitting.

It's a book with massive scope, providing us with a vivid sense of time and place as it stretches across more than fifty years and most of the globe. It's not only a love story and an exploration of mythology and the world of rock'n'roll, but an exciting and richly-woven tale of interlinked families, and along the way it deals with all sorts of unusual-but-interesting concepts, from the goat industry to pirate radio.

It's certainly not perfect. Though the three main characters are complex, it's overwhelming singular frustrating personality traits that are usually in evidence. We lose hope of seeing Vina as anything other than a diva, Ormus anywhere other than lost in his own world (literally!), Rai as anything but pathetic, though we sympathise with all of them. Further, all of them possess talents too extreme to make them believable: perhaps they're meant to be seen as the heroes of myths but this is hard to keep in mind, considering the book's mostly-realistic setting.

Their tale rambles and repeats, the pace flags and passages reek of "See how intelligent I, Salman Rushdie, am! I am mighty, and therefore I shalt get away with discussing pretentious notions that you ordinary mortals would never dare voice to your mates down the pub!" However, spookily, whenever I was thinking "Whatever happened to name_of_secondary_character? I want to see more of them", they'd be back in the next section. And the novel is undeniably a feat. It's impossible not to be left in awe of Rushdie's knowledge, the humour in his rewritten history of rock, the way he interests us in the most irrelevant of subplots, the atmosphere he evokes of politically-troubled India, acid-addled 60s Britain and even the airspace above the Iron Curtain, the thrilling twists, and the deft-handling of the rock world - we're shown Rushdie has the ability to write indulgently of its luxury and decadence, but instead chooses to allow many aspects of the characters' lives to be focussed upon. These aren't seamlessly bound together, but most of the strands are enjoyable enough separately.

I hear most of Rushdie's other novels are better, so I'll be moving on to them, but I believe this one's worth the (very long) read.

A beautiful book
This is the first Salman Rushdie book I've read. It's quite amazing. His style of writing is very different from anything I've read so far. He writes in pictures in a poetic kind of way. It's quite a long book though, and as a previous reviewer said, it's not an ideal book to be read on the way to and back from work. It's a lot more suitable for a beach holiday. I found it very inspiring and want to read his other books too.