The literary scholar James Wood has described Rushdie's books as "international language lakes," noting that "the pun is central to Rushdie's metamorphic and metaphoric vision" and that "punning is the engine" of The Ground Beneath Her Feet as it encourages the reader to make connections between the cross-cultural currents that flow through the narrative. Rushdie himself has said that the novel is about "cataclysms in people's lives" and the ways in which Rushdie dissects, divides, resurrects and reconstructs words and sentences is an act of unraveling and reassembling similar to the changes wrought by ruptures in the social fabric or in the earth's surface. To put it in another way, the syntactic and linguistic strategies of the novel are an analogue for the actions of the central thematic idea.

Rushdie has observed that "in terms of rock and roll music," he "found a new and very liberating and...