The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2000) - Plot & Excerpts
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!)
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.
What do You think about The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2000)?
Plot: This is the story of the life and death of Vina Apsara, a huge singing sensation, and everyone around her. It takes place over the course of a whole lifetime and finishes after her death.Characters: Vina and Ormus and well, there are so many. They are all described a lot and you get a vivid picture of them all in your mind, but I don’t think you’re supposed to completely understand them.Style Of Writing: It took me three months to read this book, it is so descriptive with a lot of big sentences that I had to read several times to get them to make any sense. And it’s a really hard book to get into it, it’s like reading the story on the surface but not really connecting with the book at all. By the end, I was sick of it.Overall Opinion: The story was quite small surrounded by a lot of weird things, not my usual type of book at all.Recommended If: You have some time on your hands.
—Christine Blachford
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!
—Michael Bohli
I read this when it first came out something like fifteen years ago and loved it. I gave it to a friend, who plays music, and he couldn't get past the first few chapters, complaining that Rushdie knew nothing about writing music, being in a band, etc. Needing something to read recently, I picked up my old copy looking forward to loving it again--and hoping to get the taste of "Joseph Anton" out of my mouth. Alas, either "Joseph Anton" has ruined Rushdie for me forever or I've become a lot less tolerant (or, to put a nicer light on it, more perceptive) than I was in 2000. On this reading I kept thinking, "Oh, Rushdie is monologuing again." Page upon page of one character or another pontificating and, seemingly, most of the time the reader is supposed to take it seriously. Oh, there were still parts I enjoyed; the relationships of the parents of the main characters are all nicely portrayed with the sadness of how those relationships fray and are destroyed but the main characters? I just wanted them to stop talking. It was like, I realize, the bit in "High Fidelity" (film or book, it doesn't matter) where the main character, Rob, has dinner again with Charlie, the perfect sophisticated woman whom he was never cool enough for, and realizes just how vapid she truly is. So I'm giving it three stars because I loved it when I first read it and came close to despising it on this reading.
—Maryjmetz
