The Barnes & Noble ReviewAlternately astonishing and exasperating, littered with linguistic marvels as well as irresistible puns, and positively teeming with an eclectic range of cultural desiderata, Salman Rushdie's immense new novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet , is a rambling, multidimensional rock opera that spans the latter half of the 20th century in its tale of star-crossed lovers fated to find and lose each other, again and again, throughout their extraordinary lives in music. Beginning with his first novel, Grimus (1975), Rushdie has indulged an obsession with the power of mythology to shape — for better and for worse — the society that created it. Indeed, it was his reduction of Koranic scripture to its mythic elements (and mischievous reworking of the same) that led to the Ayatollah Khomeini's decidedly unfunny valentine of 1989. For Rushdie, the fatwa shook the very foundations of the world he had known, leaving him precariously suspended between shifting realities. It is no mere coincidence, then, that this book opens on February 14, 1989, with the disappearance of the legendary rock diva Vina Apsara in a cataclysmic earthquake shortly after she sets Mexico all aquiver with an aria from Gluck's "Orfeo et Eurydice." The Ground Beneath Her Feet is the fullest expression to date of Rushdie's fascination with Indo-European mythology. Far from a straightforward retelling of the myth of Orpheus, the novel blends and blurs history, religion, philosophy, music, and pop culture to create an epic East-meets-West romance about love, death, and rock 'n' roll. At its centeris the love story of supernaturally gifted musician Ormus Cama and internationally adored pop diva Vina Apsara, narrated by Ormus's childhood friend (and, unknown to Ormus, Vina's sometime lover), Rai, a.k.a. Umeed Merchant. As Rai steels himself to the task of revealing the truth of