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The Ground Beneath Her Feet
861 pages
A kaleidoscopic, maximalist rock-and-roll epic that reimagines ancient myth through the lens of modern celebrity and earth-shattering love.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like being swept into a dizzying, kaleidoscopic rock anthem that spans continents and alternate realities. It is a sprawling, maximalist experience, demanding a reader who delights in digressions, wordplay, and the collision of high myth with low pop culture. The narrative voice is exuberant and erudite, weaving a tragicomic atmosphere that feels both intimately human and larger than life. As the story meanders through decades of music history and post-colonial identity, the emotional texture shifts from the intoxicating highs of world-conquering passion to the profound, literal tremors of grief. It is a dense, rewarding journey for those who love sentences packed to the brim with ideas, where the very fabric of reality feels as unstable and electric as a live concert.
- Mood
- kaleidoscopic
- dizzying
- vibrant
- melancholic
- Tone
- exuberant
- mythic
- erudite
- tragicomic
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- collision of East and West · transcendent power of art · mythic love and loss · instability of reality · exile and belonging
- The writing
- Exuberant, maximalist, and densely layered with multilingual wordplay, pop-culture references, and mythic resonance.
- The arc
- Moves from the intoxicating, world-conquering highs of passionate love to the profound, earth-shattering depths of grief and eventual acceptance.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave sprawling, ambitious literary fiction that blends ancient mythology with rock-and-roll history and aren't afraid of dense, digressive storytelling.
Content notes
- natural disasters
- grief and loss
- substance abuse
- sexual content
About the book
At the beginning of this stunning novel, Vina Apsara, a famous and much-loved singer, is caught up in a devastating earthquake and never seen again by human eyes. This is her story, and that of Ormus Cama, the lover who finds, loses, seeks, and again finds her, over and over, throughout his own extraordinary life in music.
Their epic romance is narrated by Ormus's childhood friend and Vina's sometime lover, her "back-door man," the photographer Rai, whose astonishing voice, filled with stories, images, myths, anger, wisdom, humor, and love, is perhaps the book's true hero. Telling the story of Ormus and Vina, he finds that he is also revealing his own truths: his human failings, his immortal longings. He is a man caught up in the loves and quarrels of the age's goddesses and gods, but dares to have ambitions of his own. And lives to tell the tale.
Around these three, the uncertain world itself is beginning to tremble and break. Cracks and tears have begun to appear in the fabric of the real. There are glimpses of abysses below the surfaces of things. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is Salman Rushdie's most gripping novel and his boldest imaginative act, a vision of our shaken, mutating times, an engagement with the whole of what is and what might be, an account of the intimate, flawed encounter between the East and the West, a brilliant remaking of the myth of Orpheus, a novel of high (and low) comedy, high (and low) passions, high (and low) culture. It is a tale of love, death, and rock 'n' roll.
Description from Open Library.
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