The Ground Beneath Her Feet (G K Hall Large Print Book Series (Paper))

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Summary: He's done it again
Review: Salman Rushdie knows how to tell stories, he knows how to enthrall his readers. The Ground Beneath His Feet is no exception, it's a colourful story about love and music, and it kept me within its magic until the last page of the book. Go ahead, read!

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Summary: The Epic democratised
Review: Grandmother stoppered the epic in a glass bottle she kept on the kitchen shelf. At bedtime she would let us taste a drop of that delicious tipple, as a fitting prelude to dreams. Each story had its flavor . We had favorites we asked for again and again. It never struck us, in those small days of childhood that we were being fed fragments in the hope we would one day get the jigsaw whole . Through the years , pieces got lost, were misplaced, went unrecognized . Some stayed ; a cameo romance, the haunting refrain to a song, a ruse, a trick, a betrayal. These were periapts, protection against change. We remembered them to assure ourselves that while the world was changing; protean , bizarre, there was still the safe haven of Once Upon a Time , Long Long ago .... With The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the epic is out of the bottle . It has shot out, unstoppable, and , with every passing page , threatens to blot out the sun and fill the sky. Caught in the revolving door of the beginning which is also the end , we gatecrash the banquet within. Strange faces throng, but mine good host is at hand to hold a mirror to us all. Be seated, then, and let the music begin! What better bard to sing this epic than Salman Rushdie? There are other delights within these covers : literary allusions, sly double entendres, architectural capriccio. Populist punsters , with Bookers to crow about, will sound peurile in the resonance of Rushdie's dazzling plural voice. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is not a good book, it is a great one, and, I'm sure, Salman Rushdie's best writing is yet to come.

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Summary: This guy's supposed to be a good writer?
Review: I found the characters completely devoid of life, and I've been subjected to Rushdie's endless seemingly profound hot air. He seems to have wrote most of this from his stream of consciousness, and I can recal nothing interesting had had to say. I stuck with him because I was shocked that this exalted author could so disappoint, but he was as bad at the end as in the middle. I've calibrated myself on "highbrow" stuff, and his ain't.

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Summary: SPEECHLESS!
Review: This is one of the times when someone feels that whatever he might say, it won't be enough!Reading "The ground beneath her feet" was one of the most revealing times of my life. Never again had I felt this way...and Rushdi..what an inspired man. His writing made me think and his story reminded me how one book can change so many things: from the way you see life to the way you share your heart and your love...

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Summary: not his cup of tea
Review: Good writing and style. But he does know anything about pop music and, incidentally, pop is the book's core.

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Summary: You can't summarize a masterpiece in one line...
Review: I have been living my youth through the Golden Era of Rock n' Roll. But, contrarily to what most of the press claims, this alternative past is a fabulous decoy- and décor- for a never ending magical story: A story told by a master story-teller, a story full of fragrances, illuminations, labyrinths and mysteries, a story about indomitable love but above all, a story that makes every paragraph an incitation to reflect on your own life; a story so intense you dread reaching the last page: you wish it never would end, but does. Comme la vie...

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Summary: Disappointing, nearly torturous experience
Review: Not every work can be a masterpiece, and this one certainly is not. My heart still soars with thoughts of Midnight's Children but it only fluttered once or twice at Rushdie's amazing verbage in this text. The first hundred pages had the marvelous qualities that I relish in his work and then the book flat-lined for nearly four hundred pages, with some slight signs of life in Mira at the end. Vina was an object that we were to worship but never know (the point perhaps) and Ormus remained a vaporous third person who by the ending I never wanted to know. Rai might have been charming, but so much of his character was hidden behind the lense that it was hard even to embrace him. Thus, I was left with pages and pages of Rushdie's prose that neither sparked interest nor streamed with enlightenment about the characters, the culture or even the music. On the whole, I would like to be reimbursed for the time that I spend on this undertaking and will likely give Rushdie a pass if he should choose to write again.

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Summary: premise is hard to accept
Review: India has always been about 10 years behind the western world with respect to pop-culture trends, so this idea of the greatest rock band in the world being from India is so unbelievable that I could not get beyond this absurd premise. Does anyone out there recall the name of even one Indian rock star? No, Ravi Shankar was not a rock-and-roller. And a lot of reviews say that this book is hilarious or satirical. I just didn't find anything funny here. I guess they mean it's funny in that popmous, British sort of un-funny way.

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Summary: The modern way of writing a fairytale
Review: I think Rhusdie made it again.In a world full of conicalness and war for profit we have the opportunity to read a book which is a fairytale in our days.Rhusdie conects East and West in a global community and shows us how to write a novel using a modern subject.Its a beginign of a new era in modern novel.

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Summary: Simply my favorite novel, period.
Review: What can I say? I've heard plenty of criticism of this novel, especially in comparison to THE SATANIC VERSES (Which, personally, I found slightly overponderous and obnoxiously abstract, and ultimately not as fulfilling as some of his other works). This novel is not trying to be a great philosophical treatise, as was VERSES. This is an entertaining myth, a rock and roll fairy tale of epic proportions. It's not going to change the face of world culture and politics, and it's not going to try to. It's not going to earn Rushdie a death sentence from anyone, with the possible exception of Madonna. This is simply an astoundingly well-written and unbelievably hilarious love story, one with a hell of a lot more heart then I'll permit myself to admit I have. It bears more than a few similarities to his other novels, but there's enough spark and innovation to more than make up. So far, I haven't heard a criticism of this work that I've found rhetorically valid. I accept the challenge; but until then, I'll be treasuring my copy, thank you.