Word: vina
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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MILWAUKEE--Milwaukee Brewers second baseman Fernando Vina will appeal a two-game suspension for putting a finger in umpire Mike Winters' face while arguing balls and strikes...
...incident developed last Friday when Vina disputed a called third strike in a game in Pittsburgh...
...mythic story of Orpheus and Eurydice, this time casting the principals as international pop/rock stars? Ergo Salman Rushdie's sixth novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Henry Holt; 575 pages; $27.50), which recounts the fabulous lives and careers of the singer-composer Ormus Cama and his beloved co-vocalist Vina Apsara, as remembered by their mutual friend, the news photographer Umeed ("Rai") Merchant. His opening sentence foretells Vina's death--she was swallowed up by an earthquake in Mexico in 1989--and Rai presents himself as a narrator with a mission: "I have chosen to tell our story, hers...
...days (or 1,001 nights) before anyone else in the world. Ormus has a problem receiving the lyrics ("The ganja, my friend, is growing in the tin; the ganja is growing in the tin"), but no one doubts that he possesses a peculiar gift, least of all Vina Apsara, who meets Ormus in a record store and realizes that the two of them will make beautiful music together. Rai explains: "For she is--will be--Dionysiac, divine, and so is--so will...
...obviously too small to hold these two myth-destined figures, and Rai decides to get out as well. ("Disorientation: loss of the East," as he notes several times.) But this exodus considerably saps the narrative vigor of Rushdie's novel. On their arc toward pop immortality, Ormus and Vina must inevitably pass through London in the mid-'60s and Manhattan in the '70s, already over-storied places and times about which Rai (and Rushdie) can find little new or interesting to add. When fictionalized versions of Rudolf Nureyev and Andy Warhol start popping up, an inspired fiction dwindles toward gossip...