About this title: Rushdie retells the myth of Orpheus and Euridice in the story of two musicians, a rock singer named Vina Apsara and the composer Orpheus Cama. Beginning with Vina's death in an earthquake, the novel travels back to tell the stories of these two characters as they intertwine with many others. Eventually, Vina is reincarnated, and the lovers find each other again.
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Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780805053081ISBN:0805053085
Description: A wonderful copy with some minor edgewear to the cover. Dust Jacket has some edgewear present. -, Hard Cover, Very Good / Very Good. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780805053081ISBN:0805053085
Description: Good in Good jacket. 168-Y-Add: Books rated "Good" may have some notes, underlining, or highlighting. These books also may contain the previous owner's name, stamp, sticker, or gift inscription, or may be library discards. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780805053081ISBN:0805053085
Description: Good in Good jacket. 154-W Ex-library. Books rated "Good" may have some notes, underlining, or highlighting. These books also may contain the previous owner's name, stamp, sticker, or gift inscription, or may be library discards. read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. 0805053085 Former library item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned. Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. read more
"This book, while long and twisting and twining and sometimes a little crazy, was a lot of fun to read, mostly because of Rushdie's wordplay and writing style. I truly appreciated how the book really meshed with my musical mind, because so many of the snippets of phrases he chose in the book were song lyrics and pop culture references, so I found that I couldn't keep reading because I had to finish the next line of the song in my head before I could move on! My friend Cindy and I have this habit in daily speech, singing whatever song lyric the conversation has reminded us of. Not only was this weaving of popular song into the text so well done, but I loved his word play and puns. This was the first book I've ever read by this author and I've heard others complain about his writing style as being too pompous or thick, but I thought it was just right. The otherworldly themes were kinda fascinating, especially imaging an alternate reality to our own when two Indian rock stars could be as big as, say, U2, and President Kennedy wasn't really shot until much later :) One of my only complaints is that I suppose the book was longer than I would have liked, and kind of felt like giving the narrative of the characters' entire lives from their parents' lives to after their deaths seemed a little much for the story... but they did make a lot of things come full circle. From a psychological standpoint, this might have been interesting, so I hope someone else enjoyed that aspect of the book as much as I loved the song snippets. I think there's something for everyone in this book, but it did take some patience to get through (also, I was super busy and didn't have much dedicated time to devote to it)."
"An amazing novel my daughter brought with her on her last visit & highly recommended. And rightly so. It's one of the best books I've ever read. Rushdie is a cultural sponge, absorbing & smoothly integrating elements from the biblical tradition, Islam, Hinduism, & Greek & Roman mythology, along with amazing bits of Indian & American popular culture, especially popular music. The writing is brilliant & extremely clever, but never gets in the way of just telling a good story, a love story of two musicians with roots in India, but who eventually become legendary figures on the pop music scene in America--a retelling of sorts of the Orpheus myth. There's undoubtedly a lot here that I missed, but I'm grateful for the story & the meatiness that I was able to absorb."
"I'd never read Rushdie before. I can see why he has a Jihad against him - even in this book which only incidentally addresses religion, he is not shy about saying he sees no place for it. But that is beside the point. Rushdie is, truly, a brilliant writer.
The story is something about two kids from India who grow up to form the biggest rock and roll band of all time in some sort of closely-allied alternate reality, outselling even the Beatles. The themes are much wider ranging. There is the love of music and art, the strange workings of culture and politics, the sense of belonging or being an outsider, and finally, in the end, a love triangle. Pretty standard literary stuff, I suppose, but there's a lot in there. In some sense it's all in there. He talks about everything. It's breathtaking. And the language is lovely, poetry all the way through. There's a sly humour through the whole thing as well, visible most clearly through the alternate reality he creates, where "Jesse Parker" wrote Heartbreak Hotel, Madonna is a music critic, and JFK survived the assassination attempt (there's also a crazy novel called "Watergate" where Nixon is thrown out of office for bugging the democrats.) Actually, more precisely, the novel is set in two parallel universes, one of which is our own and gradually fades throughout the story to become just another possibility that didn't happen.
Otherwise, I really don't know how to describe this book. It's pretty damn amazing, one of the finest works I've ever read, both in terms of scope and execution. Rushdie is incredibly in touch with very many things, both academic (mythology, film theory) and popular (music, politics, Bombay street life) and as a result his novel is real and complete in a way I find deeply inspiring.
I'm going to end by quoting a passage that I found particularly resonant, perhaps the only time I've ever seen a deep part of myself expressed well in words:
For a long while I have believed ... that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as "natural" a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a play-house or movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our places of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveler, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.
No sooner did we have ships than we rushed to sea, sailing across oceans in paper boats. No sooner did we have cars than we hit the road. No sooner did we have airplanes then we zoomed to the furthers corners of the globe. Now we year for the moon's dark side, the rocky plains of Mars, the rings of Saturn, the interstellar deeps. We send mechanical photographers into orbit, or on one-way journeys to the stars, and we weep at the wonders they transmit; we are humbled by the mighty images of far-off galaxies standing like cloud pillars in the sky, and we give names to alien rocks, as if they were our pets. We hunger for warp space, for the outlying rim of time. And this is the species that kids itself it likes to stay at home, to bind itself with--what are they called again? "ties""
"This is, as others have noted, not an easy read. I hope that's part of the Rushdie genius for understatement that I've acquired, but I'm pretty sure it's just me, wishing I was clever enough to get half of the references that get tossed off here, like so many bread crumbs leading me, where? Home? Into a volcano that closes a chapter, and a life that the world has been watching, and adoring, along with the childhood friend that really, truly loves her, but let's the love of her life use his genius to use hers, to give them, well, everything! I loved reading this book! Just when you were trying to remember if you knew the real story of pirate radio or, something about Fleetwood Mac, or starched white collars in the heat of Bombay, there will be a page, or a scenario, or even just a sentence or two, that will make you look at the page and wonder how this could possibly be the first time those words have appeared together. Like, they should only be allowed to join each other, because no other words really belong with them. Anyway, the plot, or story, or dream, whichever you prefer..has been discussed here already. Read it yourself, see if you get the same story. Go ahead,, I dare you! But read it for the sheer joy of hearing a language that you thought you knew, but really only suspected could be so meticulously and beautifully constructed."
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