Word: vina
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...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...
Farther down the avenue, Baldomero Alvarez Rios, 70, shakes his head. "The problem with young people in Cuba today," he says, "is that they have no idea what it was like before the revolution." His wife Maria Luisa Vina Alonso, 67, nods solemnly. Before 1959 they were members of what Maria calls the petite bourgeoisie, but then Baldomero's revolutionary fervor turned him into a party-line journalist. They worked all over the country and even abroad, spreading Castro's word in receptive capitals like Santiago and Mexico City...
...vintners have consistently produced supple reds that are notable for fruit and balance, as well as soft but less distinctive whites. The Wine Spectator, the leading American journal of wines and spirits, last year gave an impressive 88 (on a scale of 100) and a best-buy rating to Vina Los Vascos' 1984 Cabernet Sauvignon, which sells in the U.S. for a mere $5. Other bargain-priced Chilean wines, including Concha y Toro and St. Morillon, have also scored well in U.S. tastings...
Other people have suggested that the sudden death of Vina Mallowitz from cancer in 1977 caused him to "fall to pieces" and that the drug business was a direct response to the loss of his wife. "She was a steadying influence, she guided him," says Sherwood L. Washburn '35, formerly the head of the anthropology department at Chicago...