i'm a very very complex person

I finished Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet last night. Wow. What a book. I closed the book and there was Salman on the back cover, smiling impishly up at me, the mad ringleader of this whole crazy circus. And it really is a circus. A story of rock and roll, the book is written with rock star excess--it sprawls, it spirals, it crackles with energy and passion and anger. It's difficult to know how to describe the book. It has many features that are typical of Rushdie: the brilliant wordplay and inventive use of language, the Bombay landmarks lovingly described, the fascination with tracing the ripples of consequence that spread from even the most seemingly insignificant details, the bending of the rules of reality in ways that test the reader's ability to keep up with him, to believe. Rushdie goes even further in this last vein than he has in the other books of his that I've read. The story starts normally enough, but it gradually becomes clear that the book is set in some sort of parallel universe that is almost but not quite the same as our own. In the world of the book there is no Elvis, but an American named Jesse Garon Parker gets famous singing a song called "Heartbreak Hotel." Yossarian and Kilgore Trout are famous authors, Zapruder saves Kennedy from being assassinated, the Watergate break-in is the plot of a far fetched mystery novel, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby show up on a panel of literary critics, Schnabel and Basquiat are still part of the New York art scene in the 80s, but they've been given new first names and resurrected as photographers. The list could go on and on, and catching on to these little differences was a fun part of reading the book.

I've often talked about how magical realism leaves me cold--Garcia Marquez, Allende, even some of Rushdie's work (e.g. The Moor's Last Sigh) doesn't cut it with me. I find that magical realist novels are so often full of surface flash yet empty at the core; they lack the kind of real emotion that I need to be able to grab onto and identify with. The Ground Beneath Her Feet, however, teems with emotion, with the love of Ormus and Vina, Rai's frustrated love, Mull Standish's hopeless love, Rushdie's love for Bombay in its golden age, and his obvious and moving disappointment that its golden age no longer exists. All the fancy stuff, all the parallel universe stuff, all the playing around with reality, all that stuff is just decoration on top of a turbulent, epic, and very real love story. It helps, too, that Rai is the antithesis of a magical realist narrator. He's an unbeliever, a skeptic by nature, totally inclined against interpretation and metaphor. Having all the fantastic events of the book related in his questioning voice made it easier for me to swallow. I think I fell half in love with Rai while I was reading. His devotion to Vina and his narrative voice were just so appealing that I just couldn't help myself. I also couldn't help myself from conflating narrator and author. Foolish I know, but Rai has Salman's facility with words, his wide-ranging base of literary and cultural allusion, his sarcastic sense of humor, his secular-Muslim-growing-up-in-Bombay background--why shouldn't Salman also have Rai's endearing self-deprecation, his intense desire to prove himself, and his years-long desire for a woman he can't ever really have? I don't really know why I want Salman to have these qualities (or exactly when I got to be on a first name basis with him), but somehow I just couldn't stop seeing him reflected in Rai, which made me feel even more attached to him.

It was fascinating to read this book back to back with The Corrections, because they were similar in so many ways. Very different stories dealing with very different themes, but they're both big, ambitious books, full of allusions and connections, unafraid to be very much of their era. They both deal with the interaction between the present and the past, the way the present can never be free of the past. And I loved both of them; it's rare that I end up reading two such great books in a row.

There is so much more that I could say about The Ground Beneath Her Feet. I could talk about the incredible scope of Rushdie's allusions and the fact that he makes reference to everything from Homer to Joyce to Blade Runner to West Side Story. Or about the way the story is just saturated with the myth of Orpheus. Or about Rushdie's fascination with doubling--there are two sets of twins, two parental suicides, two hanged men in Rai's life, there's Ormus's double vision, and Rai's double exposure photographs. Or I could talk about Rushdie's obvious anger at the misunderstanding and exploitation of India by the West. Or about the music that permeates the book and the way Rushdie's descriptions made me wish I could listen to the albums of his fictional band. Or about Vina, whom I've hardly mentioned. Vina, who is the center of it all, the object of all men's longing, the force that ignites the book and holds it together. In fact, the only real criticism that I have is that the book seemed to lose its way a little bit after Vina's death. (I'm not giving anything away here--you learn that she dies in the first chapter.) The story was less compelling without her in it, and I found that I just couldn't care as much about old, decrepit Ormus pining for her memory as I did about young Ormus the heartthrob pining for her actual self.

N., you really ought to read this book. Actually, everyone ought to read this book.

Interesting fact that I learned today: Vina's death occurs on the same date--February 14, 1989--that the fatwa was issued against Rushdie for Satanic Verses.

And now, my task for the rest of this rainy Saturday afternoon is to read my own damn book. I am sick to death of myself making excuses and being too afraid to read it, so that ends today.

Well, I have finally finished The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie. I have to say that my feelings about the book are fairly mixed. As usual, I loved Rushdie's style. His writing is just remarkably intelligent and witty, and his use of language and wordplay never fail to impress me. This book seemed to be almost aggressively clever, but not in a way that was off-putting for me.

The main problem that I had with the book was that I felt a lack of emotional involvement with the plot and the characters. The book was all about the brain, and not at all about the heart, which is all well and good, I suppose, but I generally prefer books that can appeal to both. I think that there were several factors that contributed to my lack of emotional involvement in the book. One of these factors is Rushdie's use of magical realism. I find that every time I read a magical realist book, whether it's Garcia Marquez or Allende or Rushdie, I find myself distanced and distracted by all the crazy stuff going on, the 'special effects' as it were. Magical realism has a tendency to turn everything into a symbol for something else, and while there are situations in which that's very effective, it doesn't really create a sense of intimacy between book and reader. A good example of this is Moor's deformed right hand. At various points throughout the book, various significances are assigned to the hand, but at no point does Rushdie tell us anything about how it feels for Moor to grow up with this deformity. Does it make him self-conscious? Depressed? Frustrated with his lot? We never find out.

Another problem that I had with the book was that in many ways it felt like Rushdie was covering a lot of the same territory that he dealt with in Midnight's Children, which was a much better book. Both books share a vast, sprawling sense of Indian history and culture, a protagonist who is both inextricably linked to and also alienated from that culture, a concern with matters of fate and circumstance, etc. Midnight's Children, however, does a better job of maintaining a clear narrative thrust, and kept me much more involved than The Moor's Last Sigh.

All in all, I'm glad I read it, if only because it gives me a better understanding of Rushdie as a writer, but I certainly wouldn't call it my new favorite book.