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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 langua...
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 w...
A strange and overflowing novel, which plunges us into the destiny of an imaginary rock group, whose two leaders, united and torn by an incredible love story, will gradually change the face of the world.The story is precious for the pinch of fantasy. The author has sprinkled it, the group's inspiration being in contact with a mysterious parallel dimension that gradually invades the story.In the end, a book that is worth the detour, especially for what we learn about India, but not always easy, e...
Absolute favourite. The man weaves a tale like no other. <3
Ok, ok, I know Rushdie has an obvious gift for language, and almost no one can create a better pun, but this "retelling of the Orpheus myth via an alternate-reality alternative-history of rock n' roll" (whew) left me decidedly un-gripped. As other readers have discovered, almost all of the characters are unlikeable. Vina, the rock goddess who is supposedly adored by the world, is self-centered and execrable, her endlessly cuckolded husband/virtuoso guitarist Ormus Cama is a dope, and Rai the nar...
Having only read Midnight's Children by this author before, I was actually a tiny bit terrified of trying this one, especially on audio. It wasn't nearly as hard to follow so the audio ended up being an excellent option.The story is told by a man named Rai and covers the time from his first sight of Vina until after her death. It tells the story of two lovers, Vina and Ormus, whose music is so compelling that it changes the world. Throughout the story we also know that Rai is in love with Vina a...
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...
I really wanted to read this book, and though I haven't read much else by him, I really like Salman Rushdie.. But I just couldn't get into this. Every time I picked it up I couldn't get through more than 20 pages without putting it down and finding myself with no incentive to pick it back up again. From October 2007 until about a month ago I hadn't even gotten through half the book.Suffice it to say I was not impressed. I felt like it was just this long-winded story of nothing. There was so much...
4.5 starsThis was exceptionally well done. A+ for plan and execution Mr. Rushdie. Reading Salman Rushdie makes me want to take an advanced mythology class. He really uses it well. According to Wiki, it is a variation on the Orpheus/Eurydice myth with rock music replacing Orpheus' lyre. The myth works as a red thread from which the author sometimes strays, but to which he attaches an endless series of references. I feel like I maybe got half the references. Thanks to my recent read of The Sandman...
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 hand though, I will probably reread Shame and Midnight's Children once in a while, I loved those books.
I honestly was bored just a few pages into this one. I don't even remember finishing it. I think that as much as I loved The Satanic Verses, Midnight's Children, and The Moor's Last Sigh as well as Jaguar Nights, Imaginary Homelands, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories, his other fiction just has not had the power to pull me in as much into his universe. Apparently, I am not the only one on GR to have been underwhelmed by this one so it will sink low on my to-be-read-again-when-I-am-retired-and-re...
i will confess that i started "satanic verses" ... key word, started. i read the first 10-15 pages, and realized that i had NO idea what i was reading. so i turned to a nifty cliff note thing on line and realized that what i had read and re-read four times was the protagonists falling through the air after their airplane kabooms ... surprising to me. and thats when i did not read anymore (maybe some other day).i picked this one up hesitantly. i wanted to read something by rushdie, and a good fri...
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 bookhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ-XKz...***24.10.2008"The only people who see the
Rushie sir, I love you so please don't mind me giving this book Three stars :)"Those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainly, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers’ seal of approval. But the truth le...
Our world is apparently the imaginary one, Greek myths, India as always and the girl/woman who everyone wants to be or be with.Lets get the Greek myths out of the way first, I see the parts and how Rushdie wanted them bring the Ormus and Vina love affair into a higher realm but it felt like a minor piece. Vina and Ormus' relationship was always set apart by their actions both chaste and promiscuous. I think Rushdie came up with the mythology part just to name the final farewell tour the Underwor...
I’d never read Rushdie before. I can see why he has a Jihad against him — even in this book which only incidentally addresses religion, he is not shy about saying he sees no place for it. But that is beside the point. Rushdie is, truly, a brilliant writer.The story is something about two kids from India who grow up to form the biggest rock and roll band of all time in some sort of closely-allied alternate reality, outselling even the Beatles. The themes are much wider ranging. There is the love
THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET is a sort of postmodern retelling of the Eurydice and Orpheus myth. Rock music replaces, in this novel, Orpheus's lyre.No brief summary can hope to convey all the historical, religious, mythological and pop musical range of references of this ambitious, original and extremely long novel. There is an epic love story, a story of emigration, but, above all, it is a fictive history of rock music.Despite Rushdie's amazing talent as a writer, this novel was rather disappoin...
Orpheus and Eurydice as rock stars. Epic tale of music 'n' love.And the deification of genius. Also, highlights celebrity's recent secularisation. How today's stars function for community instead of idolatry. "the point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire... Now that they've gone, the high drama's over. What remains is ordinary human life."
I think this is my favorite Rushdie book yet. No less of a deep dive into Bombay, India, Europe, current political events, religion and history than the other books of his I've read, this one adds Rock and the modern world as a central theme, and the mythical-magical, so to speak analysis of power and alternate worlds teeming with real and unreal examples of iconic ways that the world just is.The Orpheus and Eurdike storyline this is woven around is brilliantly exhumed and turned into living roc...
Well. This baggy monster was certainly a giant step down from everything else Salman Rushdie has written. I happened upon a review that quite magically expressed my sentiments about the novel, with great specificity.https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...Up until now, I thought the man could do no wrong. I didn't love his autobiography, but I gave him a pass on that. It's a different type of writing. But this was a giant flop, redeemed only slightly by some beautiful, Rushdie-esque passages ear...