Beauty in Words: The Ground Beneath Her Feet
I am reading Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's beautiful. It's cynical and romantic at once, and so gorgeously written I want to read whole paragraphs out loud.
It's a reimagining of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in the world of modern pop music, and it follows Ormus Cama, a Bombay-born Parsi musician and song-writer and his love for Vina Apsara, a singer. The narrator, Rai, is a photographer who is a close friend of Ormus and is in love with Vina, so there is a gorgeous duality of intimacy and 'outsider'ness in it.
I can almost taste and smell and touch everything, it's so vivid.
Here is a quote from it:
"We find ground on which to make out stand. In India, that place obsessed by place, belonging-to-your-place, knowing-your-place, we are mostly given that territory, and that's that, no arguments, get on with it. But Ormus and Vina and I, we couldn't accept that, we came loose. Among the great struggles of man - good/evil, reason/unreason, etc. - there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey. And if you are Ormus Came, if you are Vina Apsara, whose songs could cross all frontiers, even the frontiers of people's hearts, then perhaps you believed all ground could be skipped over, all frontiers would crumple before the sorcery of the tune. Off you'd go, off your turf, beyond family and clan and nation and race, flying untouchably over the minefields of taboo, until you stood at last at the last gateway, the most forbidden of all doors. Where you blood sings in your ears, Don't even think about it. And you think about it, you cross that final frontier, and perhaps, perhaps - we'll see how the tale works out - you have finally gone too far, and are destroyed."
It's a reimagining of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in the world of modern pop music, and it follows Ormus Cama, a Bombay-born Parsi musician and song-writer and his love for Vina Apsara, a singer. The narrator, Rai, is a photographer who is a close friend of Ormus and is in love with Vina, so there is a gorgeous duality of intimacy and 'outsider'ness in it.
I can almost taste and smell and touch everything, it's so vivid.
Here is a quote from it:
"We find ground on which to make out stand. In India, that place obsessed by place, belonging-to-your-place, knowing-your-place, we are mostly given that territory, and that's that, no arguments, get on with it. But Ormus and Vina and I, we couldn't accept that, we came loose. Among the great struggles of man - good/evil, reason/unreason, etc. - there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey. And if you are Ormus Came, if you are Vina Apsara, whose songs could cross all frontiers, even the frontiers of people's hearts, then perhaps you believed all ground could be skipped over, all frontiers would crumple before the sorcery of the tune. Off you'd go, off your turf, beyond family and clan and nation and race, flying untouchably over the minefields of taboo, until you stood at last at the last gateway, the most forbidden of all doors. Where you blood sings in your ears, Don't even think about it. And you think about it, you cross that final frontier, and perhaps, perhaps - we'll see how the tale works out - you have finally gone too far, and are destroyed."