|
Loading... The Ground Beneath Her Feetby Salman Rushdie
LibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendationsLoading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I either love or hate Salman Rushdie. This book comes into the second category. I'll never finish this book nor Haroun and the Sea of Stories, nor the Satanic Verses. Life is too short to plough through more than the first 50 pages if you haven't got into it by that stage. On the other though, I will probably reread Shame and Midnight's Children once in a while, I loved those books. While not unreadable, Rushdie seems off his game in this one. Compared to the genius of "Midnight's Children," "The Satanic Verses," and "The Moor's Last Sigh," the novel reads like a B-side. What was most off-putting was his reliance on cliches and tired idioms. Cliches were used as a crutch, not as something that's subverted. The. Best. Book. Ever. Written. All I can say is wow. Reading a Salman Rushdie novel is like living another life, in another world, somewhat like our own, but mixed up in different ways. It's more like a saga than a novel, but as sagas go, it's one wild ride. Rushdie takes on the history of Rock 'n' Roll and the Orpheus myth. 0.180 seconds to build listing
Amazon.com (ISBN 0224044192, Hardcover)The ground shifts repeatedly beneath the reader's feet during the course of Salman Rushdie's sixth novel, a riff on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth set in the high-octane world of rock & roll. Readers get their first clues early on that the universe Rushdie is creating here is not quite the one we know: Jesse Aron Parker, for example, wrote "Heartbreak Hotel"; Carly Simon and Guinevere Garfunkel sang "Bridge over Troubled Water"; and Shirley Jones and Gordon McRae starred in "South Pacific." And as the novel progresses, Rushdie adds unmistakable elements of science fiction to his already patented magical realism, with occasionally uneven results.Rushdie's cunning musician is Ormus Cana, the Bombay-born founder of the most popular group in the world. Ormus's Eurydice (and lead singer) is Vina Apsara, the daughter of a Greek American woman and an Indian father who abandoned the family. What these two share, besides amazing musical talent, is a decidedly twisted family life: Ormus's twin brother died at birth and communicates to him from "the other side"; his older brothers, also twins, are, respectively, brain-damaged and a serial killer. Vina, on the other hand, grew up in rural West Virginia where she returned home one day to find her stepfather and sisters shot to death and her mother hanging from a rafter in the barn. No wonder these two believe they were made for each other. Narrated by Rai Merchant, a childhood friend of both Vina and Ormus, The Ground Beneath Her Feet begins with a terrible earthquake in 1989 that swallows Vina whole, then moves back in time to chronicle the tangled histories of all the main characters and a host of minor ones as well. Rushdie's canvas is huge, stretching from India to London to New York and beyond--and there's plenty of room for him to punctuate this epic tale with pointed commentary on his own situation: Muslim-born Rai, for example, remarks that "my parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear.... You may argue that the gift was a poisoned chalice, but even if so, that's a cup from which I'd happily drink again." Despite earthquakes, heartbreaks, and a rip in the time-space continuum, The Ground Beneath Her Feet may be the most optimistic, accessible novel Rushdie has yet written. --Alix Wilber (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:11 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
Abebooks |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The story is described as a retelling of the Orpheus/Eurydice myth and certainly the theme keeps reappearing, as do many other links between myth, religion and reality, at heart, however, it's the classic love triangle with a twist or two, set in the world of Rock.
First of all, I want to state for the record that I very much enjoyed it. However, despite this and being completely absorbed every time I picked it up, I did find myself constantly being distracted by other books. What I'm saying, I think, is that it wasn't a truly gripping book in the usual sense. This wasn't completely because the book starts with the end - there are enough twists and turns throughout that you know the end at the beginning is not the whole story (if you follow my tongue twister!).
The photographic imagery at various moments is incredibly vivid (there are one or two scenes I can picture now), and the many minor characters, and their stories, wonderful, but at times the plot becomes a little ponderous. The structure jarred me a little too - 5/6 of the book leading back up to the earthquake and then what felt (to me anyway) like a sudden change of direction and, in some ways, pace, for the final 1/6. I also struggled a little with just why these two men (and indeed the whole world) would fall in love with such an irritating character as Vina (oooh I hate it when people end every sentence with a question? Even when it's not obviously a question? You know what I mean?!) - and, indeed, the fact that every single character seems to be incredibly self-absorbed (not just those who are famous - seriously, I'm really struggling to think of a character with more than a couple of lines who isn't). But these were really quite minor annoyances in the general scheme of things and I really am glad that I read this. (