Volume 46, Number 8 · May 6, 1999
Gods & Monsters
By Tim Parks
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
by Salman Rushdie
Henry Holt, 575 pp., $27.50
'The art [of the novel],' wrote Schopenhauer, 'lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life.'[1] Salman Rushdie would not agree. It is not that there is no inner life in his new novel. Nor indeed does one feel that Rushdie would require any external occurrences at all to set his fertile mind in motion. It is just that the sheer quantity of events that crowd these 575 pages is such as to overwhelm any depiction of inner life or any mind's attempt to grasp the half of them. For brevity's sake, more elaborate syntax will have to give way to the list—as so often it does in Rushdie's prose—if we are to offer the slightest idea of what is between these covers.
Review, 5521 words
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