The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie

Author:Salman Rushdie
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307367792
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2000-05-09T10:00:00+00:00

Alis cracking up, Hawthorne Crossley says, Must be the sleep deprivation.

Must be the hat, Waldo opines, Or is he, by any chance, illegal?

If he was illegal they’d have closed us down by now, Hawthorne reasons.

Ormus says nothing when he sees the long text. He understands that Eno is sending a message directly to him. He feels the hot sting of its criticism and tries to catch the engineer’s eye. But Eno seems far away.

Many years will pass before Ormus Cama learns that the author of the long text is not Eno Barber but Euripides. The shorter texts, however, are Eno’s own.

Mind your backs. Mind your heads. And these messages? Who are they for?

At The Witch, too, Ormus is receiving messages. She still sometimes comes to his bed when the whim takes her. Dialogue being over, they do not speak. They greet, fuck, part in silence: the copulation of ghosts. But sometimes she, too, leaves him notes. Some are melancholy, opaque. If music could cure sorrow it would be precious. But no one thought of using songs and stringed instruments to banish the bitterness and pain of life. Most of the notes, however, are about Antoinette, whose dominant personality seems entirely to have subjugated She’s. Antoinette’s hard life and times. Disowned by her wealthy family for marrying the club-footed Standish, and then abandoned by the bastard with two small children and no income, she dragged herself out of the gutter by her own talents and round-the-clock work. She is a frightening woman; no one who makes an enemy of her will carry off an easy victory.

The notes are confused. Sometimes they are fearful of Antoinette’s rage, at other times they praise her generous love. Towards Tommy Gin, with his vain tousle of carefully teased red hair, his floral waistcoats, his preening, his bigotry, She’s scribblings are unreservedly hostile. He thinks he invented her, he thinks he invented everything, the clothes, the music, the attitude, the protest marches, the peace sign, the women’s movement, Black is Beautiful, the drugs, the books, the magazines, the whole generation. I guess none of us would have anything in our heads if not for him, but in fact he’s not important, just an evil little shit who knows how to get himself noticed, but she’s a real artist, she doesn’t go in for all that crap, she creates beauty from the depths of her wounded soul, and you wait and see, she’ll break off with him any day now, she’ll cut him out completely, the Witch doesn’t need a Wizard, and once she’s dumped him he’ll just shrivel and die like a vampire in the sun. It seems that silent She has a lot of words locked up inside her, after all. Apollo is in there. Behind the black Dionysiac clouds enveloping this young woman, the sun god is struggling to release his light. It doesn’t take Ormus long to understand that She is deeply in love with her boss. Men may come and men may

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.