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At the beginning, 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: the story of
a love that extends across their entire lives, and
even beyond death.
Their epic romance stretches from the cosmopolitan
Bombay of the 1950s, through the vibrant London scene
of the '60s, to the last quarter-century--intense,
frenzied, crucial--of New York life. It 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, humour 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.
In the words of one of Ormus Cama's songs: It shouldn't
be this way. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is Salman
Rushdie's most gripping novel and his boldest imaginative
act, a re-imagining of our shaken, mutating times,
an account of the intimate, flawed encounter between
the East and the West, a stunning "re-make" of the
myth of Orpheus, a novel of high (and low) comedy,
high (and low) passions, high (and low) culture. It
is a classic tale of love, death and rock 'n' roll.
(from the inside cover)
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