We are once again treated to the story of several characters who leave India to wander the world and invent new identities for themselves abroad. Rushdie's earlier novels ''The Ground Beneath Her Feet'' addresses the themes of exile, metamorphosis and flux, and like those earlier books it examines such issues through the prism of multiple dichotomies: between home and rootlessness, love and death, East and West, reason and the irrational. Rushdie's myriad talents as a writer, the resulting novel is a decidedly disappointing performance: a handful of dazzling set pieces, bundled together with long-winded digressions, tiresome soliloquizing about love and death and art, and cliched descriptions of the rock-and-roll business worthy of Jackie Collins. Picture Orpheus trying to recapture his beloved (or at least her memory) by going on a worldwide stadium tour titled ''Into the Underworld.''ĭespite Mr. Picture Eurydice not only being condemned to Hades but also being literally swallowed by the ground during an earthquake. Rushdie's telling) as a brooding, kitschy combo of Elvis, Dylan and Lennon and Eurydice (that is, Vina Apsara) as a sort of fairy tale composite of Madonna and Diana, Princess of Wales. ''The Ground Beneath Her Feet,'' Salman Rushdie's loose, baggy monster of a new novel, is a retelling of the Orpheus myth that recasts both the doomed musician and his lost lady love as rock stars.
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