From Powells.com
Salman Rushdie is the winner of numerous literary awards and one of the most respected writers of the last few decades. In 1981 he was awarded British Commonwealth's prestigious Booker Prize for
Midnight's Children, which in 1993 received the "Booker of Bookers" Prize: the best of the award's recipients in its 25-year history. Rushdie is the author of seven novels, including
Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses, and
The Moor's Last Sigh; a collection of short stories; a book of reportage; two volumes of essays; and a work of film criticism.
His latest novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, begins on St. Valentine's Day, 1989, on the last day of Vina Apsara's life. She literally loses the ground beneath her feet, dying in a shocking earthquake. February 14, 1989 also happens to be the date that the Ayatollah Khomeini announced the fatwa calling for Rushdie's death. And thus begins Rushdie's reworked myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in a Postmodern, parallel universe where Lee Harvey Oswald's gun jammed and Carly Simon and Guinevere Garfunkel sang "Bridge over Troubled Water." This epic love story spans decades, from exotic and cosmopolitan Bombay in the fifties to London's Carnaby Street scene of the sixties to the glitzy, crazy New York of the eighties and nineties. Throughout, the world of rock'n'roll serves as backdrop. Vina is Eurydice to Ormus Cama's Orpheus, and their story of fame, fortune and tragedy is narrated in a wry, confiding manner by their longtime friend (and sometime lover to Vina) Rai, who is a world famous photographer.
This is probably Rushdie's most accessible novel, yet never lacking in his traditional expansive color and sparkling humor. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is high class, rollicking entertainment that celebrates America, pop culture and the mythology of celebrity. Georgie, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Review
"All kinds of criticism can be made against this novel, but it is certainly a considerable achievement, inventive and complex, a student of the ancient myths but beautifully truant with its apparently limitless allusions (to the history of pop music, to Anglican hymns, to various literatures, to popular culture, and so on), demanding in its spiraling anecdotalism, rigorous in its thematic persistence, and idiosyncratically intelligent." James Wood, The New Republic (read the entire )