I have fallen hard. For a novel...
Jul. 2nd, 2007 07:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dangermousieHere are some awesome quotes about the relationship between Ormus and Vina, the protagonists of The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
I am seriously in awe of Rushdie’s writing:
(1) [on what love means to different people] Whereas for Ormus Cama it was just a simple matter of life and death. Love was for life, and endured beyond death. Love was Vina, and beyond Vina there was nothing but the void.
(2) He loved her like an addict: the more of her he had, the more he needed. She loved him like a student, needing his good opinion, playing up to him in the hope of drawing forth the magic of his smile. But she also, from the very beginning, needed to leave him and go elsewhere to play, He was her seriousness, he was the depths of her being, but he could not also be her frivolity.
(3) OMG. There is a super-awesome scene where Ormus ‘wins’ Vina from her abusive guardian at cards (if he wins, Vina is free. And if he loses, he works for guardian until all expenses guardian spent on Vina are paid for). And the following quote made me glee again:
“You heard the man,” he grinned. “I won you fair and square. Now you belong to me.”
He was wrong. Vina belonged to no man, not even to him, though she loved him till the day she died. She reached out towards him, offering a caress of thanks. He stepped back, seriously. “No touching,” he reminded her. “Not until you are sixteen years and one day old.”
“And not then, not until you’re decently married,” said my mother, “if I have anything to do with it.”
(4) She was a rag-bag of selves, torn fragments of people she might have become. Some days she sat crumpled in a corner like a string-cut puppet, and when she jerked into life you never knew who would be there, in her skin. Sweet or savage, serene or stormy, funny or sad: she had as many moods as Old Man of the Sea, who would transform himself over and over again if you tried to grab him, for he knew that if you did capture him he would have to grant you your deepest wish. Fortunately for her, she found Ormus, who just hung on to her, held her spirit tight in his love without laying a finger on her body, until at last she stopped changing, was no longer ocean then fire then avalanche then wind, and was just herself, one day after her sixteenth birthday, in his arms. And then she kept her side of the bargain and, for one night, gave him his heart’s desire.
I am seriously in awe of Rushdie’s writing:
(1) [on what love means to different people] Whereas for Ormus Cama it was just a simple matter of life and death. Love was for life, and endured beyond death. Love was Vina, and beyond Vina there was nothing but the void.
(2) He loved her like an addict: the more of her he had, the more he needed. She loved him like a student, needing his good opinion, playing up to him in the hope of drawing forth the magic of his smile. But she also, from the very beginning, needed to leave him and go elsewhere to play, He was her seriousness, he was the depths of her being, but he could not also be her frivolity.
(3) OMG. There is a super-awesome scene where Ormus ‘wins’ Vina from her abusive guardian at cards (if he wins, Vina is free. And if he loses, he works for guardian until all expenses guardian spent on Vina are paid for). And the following quote made me glee again:
“You heard the man,” he grinned. “I won you fair and square. Now you belong to me.”
He was wrong. Vina belonged to no man, not even to him, though she loved him till the day she died. She reached out towards him, offering a caress of thanks. He stepped back, seriously. “No touching,” he reminded her. “Not until you are sixteen years and one day old.”
“And not then, not until you’re decently married,” said my mother, “if I have anything to do with it.”
(4) She was a rag-bag of selves, torn fragments of people she might have become. Some days she sat crumpled in a corner like a string-cut puppet, and when she jerked into life you never knew who would be there, in her skin. Sweet or savage, serene or stormy, funny or sad: she had as many moods as Old Man of the Sea, who would transform himself over and over again if you tried to grab him, for he knew that if you did capture him he would have to grant you your deepest wish. Fortunately for her, she found Ormus, who just hung on to her, held her spirit tight in his love without laying a finger on her body, until at last she stopped changing, was no longer ocean then fire then avalanche then wind, and was just herself, one day after her sixteenth birthday, in his arms. And then she kept her side of the bargain and, for one night, gave him his heart’s desire.
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Date: 2007-07-04 04:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-05 03:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-05 05:08 pm (UTC)I just adore Rushdie, I started reading him in '95, I think the first thing I read was Imaginary Homelands which is a collection of his non-fiction work from 1981-91. and then I went about reading everything he had written up until then. the only novel of his I don't like is Fury(from 2000, I think, wait, it's probably from 2001, I had just started reading it around 9/11, I remember), it wasn't bad but it wasn't what I have come to expect from Rushdie and it was so disappointing after The Ground Beneath Her Feet, but his last novel Shalimar the Clown was excellent.
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Date: 2007-07-05 05:19 pm (UTC)