 |
- General fiction - |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The Ground Beneath Her Feet |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
T he Ground Beneath Her Feet bySalman Rushdie Random House (Vintage Books) 575 pages, 2000 ISBN 0676972640 Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2000, Best Book for Eurasia. Bone up on your Greek mythology, grab a world atlas, and have a dictionary handy when you curl up with Salman Rushdie’s epic novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Narrated by photojournalist Umeed (Rai) Merchant, the sweeping story spans fifty years of his life and the lives his best friends, Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara. It’s a love story, a history lesson, a literature lesson, a tale of the supernatural (specters, parallel universes, the Underworld), a re-defining of good versus evil; there’s just not much this tale doesn’t have. It is the story of life’s shifting patterns and the delicate nature of the earth and those of us who inhabit it. But most of all, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is the story of the birth of rock ‘n roll. "…it’s the technology that has taken the music back to its roots, its origins in North African atonal call-and-response rhythms. When the slaves came across the sea and were forbidden to use their drums, their talking drums, they listened to the music of the Irish slave drivers, the three-chord Celtic folk songs, and turned it into the blues. And after the end of slavery they got their drums back and that was r&b, and white kids took that from them and added amplification and that was the birth of the rock ‘n roll." Ormus Cama is a young man from India whose singing and lifestyle eerily resemble America’s own Elvis Presley, down to the dead twin, the swiveling hips, the courtship of Vina (more like Madonna than Priscilla), and the meteoric rise of his fame. An abused and angry Vina Apsara (half-Indian/half-American) arrives in India at the age of twelve, hating everything and everyone in site. Ormus who is seventeen years old, falls for her and vows not to touch her until she turns sixteen. After her birthday, the young couple share one night of passion before Vina flees back to America. After the death of his father, Ormus follows his mother to Britain where he joins forces with Mull Standish, a pirate radio operator who broadcasts the latest rock ‘n roll from leaky ships off the coast. Nightly, he brandishes his broken heart over the airwaves from Radio Freddie. But Vina is in the United States and cannot hear his undying prostrations of love. While on leave from the battered boat, Ormus is involved in a car accident that leaves him in a coma. Only when Vina arrives three years later, and whispers in his ear, does he regain consciousness, amazingly with little ill effects from his long sleep. He continues his courtship of her. She is twenty-seven when he asks her to marry him, but she refuses although she loves him and only him. Ormus does get the promise of marriage in ten years. He lives, a dedicated celibate, until that day arrives. In the meantime, their band named VTO becomes the hottest act on the globe, surpassing the fame of Elvis and The Beatles. Ormus and Vina so marry, but it’s not a happy eight years. Vina needs freedom. She takes Rai as a lover, confident - a symbol. Although the three have been friends since Vina first arrived in India, Rai is able to keep his feelings for Vina hidden from Ormus. Rai knows he is betraying Ormus, but his love for the beauty overcomes his every other feeling. Salman Rushdie’s writing is flawless, sometimes his sentences are long and complicated - worthy of William Faulkner. The novel is filled with puns and allusions, ranging from classical mythology to obscure television shows, from classic literature to recent novels. I’m not sure anyone under forty would recognize all the references. One of my favorites is the blind record producer, Yul Singh (get it - you’ll sing) surrounded by an entourage of such characters as Will Singh, Can Singh, etc. And perhaps second are the heavily sprinkled song lyrics ("I just met a girl named Maria.") throughout the story. It was fun to try and catch them all. It’s no wonder that The Ground Beneath Her Feet won the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2000, Best Book for Eurasia. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||