New works by these authors are eagerly awaited, so for aficionados of South Asian literature, 1999 is a banner year in yielding a novel by each. Seth is best-known for his A Suitable Boy and Rushdie for novels including Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and the infamous, fatwah-inducing Satanic Verses. Both Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth were well-respected authors long before the meteoric rise of Arundhati Roy, whose phenomenal 1997 success with The God of Small Things sparked an unprecedented interest in Indian literature for readers world-wide. This year, two of India’s preeminent writers of English language fiction have produced novels based on the legend. The story articulates the anguish of heartbreak and the agonies of accepting loss it is not difficult to understand how this tale can have resonated through the centuries with anyone who has ever so much as contemplated a desperate bid to revive a dead romance. Orpheus, the greatest musician in the world, refuses to accept her death and descends to the underworld, where he sings so persuasively that Hades allows him to take back his bride, only to lose her again (in most versions of the tale) because of lingering doubt and weakness. In it, Eurydice dies of a snake bite on her wedding day. The parable of love lost and almost restored by the power of music’s irresistible rhetoric is practically an article of faith for those who want to believe music can express more than mere words.

Musicians and music-lovers through the ages have found the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice compelling. New York: Penguin Books, 1992, 118-127.The Ground Beneath Her Feet. “The Location of Brazil.” Imaginary Homelands. New York: The Modern Library, 2003, 92-93. “Rock Music: A Sleeve Note.” Step across This Line. Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction. The Gutemberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. “The structural study of myth.” Structural Anthropology. Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of a Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia. “Civilization in Transition.” Collected Works 10.

“Des Tours de Babel.” Difference in Translation. “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader.

The ground beneath her feet book