Fury

Rating:
Summary: Down and Out in London and New York
Review: Something made Salman Rushdie, an author of prodigious talents, have to write this book, but you don't have to read it. Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" and "The Satanic Verses" soar with their larger than life characters, rich depictions of the Indian subcontinent, lyrical prose, and magic realism, and they tell fine stories. "Fury," by contrast, is a ruminating monologue, a screed, which wrestles darkly with American mass culture, the overclass, personas, the political pretensions of the Indian diaspora, intellectual honesty, and the dilemma of love.

There is narrative heat here but precious little light. Rushdie's characters fail to engage. His issues fail to resolve. A tragedy worthy of the Greek Furies, who horribly punish unavenged crimes, utterly fails to develop. Unless you happen to be writing your dissertation on Rushdie, you can safely pass on "Fury."

Rating:
Summary: Despair
Review: Most critics have described the latest novel of Salman Rushdie as a failure. Very simply, they are right. The contrast with Rushdie's three eighties novels are striking. Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses were not only amazingly inventive and ingenious, they were also both deeply moving and very cutting politically. Midnight's Children included a horrifying description of Pakistan's unspeakable brutality against Bangladesh in 1971 as well as the thuggishness of Indira Gandhi's State of Emergency. Shame, of course, was a damning portrait of Pakistani politics, caught between a vicious military and clerical elite and a demagogic populist pseudo-socialism. The Satanic Verses, in turn, was a brilliant attack on British racism and insularity, Islamic fundamentalism and Hindu communalism. And throughout all these books there was the alternative of a secular and leftist politics. After writing The Satanic Verses, of course, Rushdie was forced to spend his life in hiding from the death threat issued by the Iranian government. Although Rushdie has gradually been allowed to be seen more and more in public, he has been isolated from his native India and Pakistan, and from much of the plebian vitality that infused his novel. At the same time Pakistan and Indian politics have become even more hopeless. The possibility of either secularism or a leftism or even a politics seems increasingly remote.

The consequences of this on his fiction are clear. The New York that depressed academic and millionaire Malik Solanka arrives is the gaudy world of celebrity and power, the city as viewed by the writer on hiding on brief vacation. It is not the communities of Jewish, "working-class Catholic," black or Hispanic communities. It is not a city with a society or a history or a politics. The result, not surprisingly, is that his portrait of American consumerism is trite, uninventive, unmemorable, predictable. There are other problems. At times, we are told, Solanka is filled with rage, with venom. Indeed, the reason the 55 year old academic suddenly came to New York was because one night he found himself holding a knife over his sleeping wife. But we get no description of his rage, compared to Celine, or even Mordecai Richeler's Barney's Version, they are the mildest of reproofs. The linguistic inventiveness seems to have almost completely dissipated. There are still the long sentences, and the string of details, but there is no real force or passion behind them. There is nothing here like the throw-away paragraph on the Aliens Show that Rushdie wrote in the Satanic Verses.

During the novel Solanka conducts three love affairs, one with his younger wife, the other two with stunningly beautiful women young enough to be his daughters. Given that Rushdie is Solanka's age and has recently left his own wife, one might consider this an unpleasant self-indulgent fantasy. There is in fact good reason to think so, and the fact that the relationships fail do not remove the bad taste from the reader's mouth. Nor does the incest motif which also complicates one relationship succeed either, since it is almost impossible to write about the sexual abuse of children without appearing meretricious. (Yet this does lead to one of the book's few memorable images: "He [Malik] could barely speak to her [his mother] without provoking a howl of guilty grief. This alienated Malik. He needed a mother, not a waterworks utility like the one on the Monopoly board.")

Solanka has made his fortune, twice, because he has produced a series of dolls which have for reason we need not go into become wildly popular. Yet even here Rushdie's interest is slack. A related subplot about Fijian politics, on an island named Lilliput-Blefuscu in honor of Jonathan Swift, also seems weak and underdeveloped. (There is one good pun about eating eggs, though). So why, may one legitimately ask, does this book get three stars, and not two or one?

The answer is that although Rushdie's portrait is probably unconscious, and although the work is infused with an aesthetic illness that may well prove terminal, something of value is being described. The title is misleading, since what is lacking is fury, passion, a sense of injustice and indignation. (Again, one should note the contrast with Swift.) Solanka himself is not motivated by rage, but by its absence. Indeed, he increasingly lives in a society where such sentiments are inconceivable. If the New York of Fury is a world without politics or history or society, then that is partially because that is the way its rulers wish it, as democracy moves from the consent of the governed to finding ingenious ways of ensuring their acquiesence. If the hero of the Satanic Verses could redeem himself by civic duty and love for his dying father, that is increasingly not an option in today's world. Sheer greed and selfishness masquerade as Anti-Utopian principle, while invoking Orwell is a substitute for intelligence and moral courage. In such a world great sex is always possible for the rich, even for rich 55 year old Indian academics, but love and hope are truly utopian, (and ergo, truly evil in the world of Peretzspeak). In such a society, Solanka's self-pity, his solipsism, his brittle personality is all too realistic. And more like V.S. Naipaul than either author would like to admit.

Rating:
Summary: Oh Rushdie where art thou?
Review: I adore Salman Rushdie. I have read all of his books, stories and the majority of his articles. I generally devore them, savor each line and word, and simply can't put them down.
The minute I heard that he had a new book out I ran out and bought it that same day. Unfortunatly it turned out to be less enthralling than his other works. It was disturbing the way the Sept. 11th attacks appear, it certainly touched a nerve.
This is a dark book, but lacks the ability to laugh at life, and find passion that are hallmarks of his other works.
I had trouble getting through this one, I didn't enjoy it as much as "The Ground Benieth her Feet" or "Haroun and the Sea of Stories."
It is a good, solid book, but it didn't live up to the hype and expectation of his name. I even saw it on a Newsweek worst of 2001 list, how uncharacteristic is that?
Make of it what you will, I still wait on baited breath for his next work....

Rating:
Summary: Cliche-heavy and lingustically stale is the least of it.....
Review: It's no suprise this novel was rendered obsolete by the 9-11 attacks a week after it came out. Rushdie fumbled his chance to write in-depth on third world anger, and Muslim anger. Instead he gave us a feeble, guest-list attempt to get hmself noticed by the celebs he seems to disdain.

What is it with Rushdie that he thinks he can churn out any old drivel, heap on the references to mythology, and expect everyone to think him a genius? (Banging Padma, now THAT'S genius; but not this appallingly sloppy novel.)
The plot is sad - the 3AM meeting with the three beautiful women who are dying to shag this smelly old professor is groanworthy. The characters are woefully unbelievable. This was confirmed for me when he started writing about dot-commers, and got swept along with all their pathetic hype. As a plot, it was embarrassingly dated even as he wrote it (in 2000). Then he starts throwing in references to "replicating" and "mirroring" web sites, it's just plain awful. He even uses the word "hip" to say how hip they are.

As for using incest as the ultimate explanation for character - that's very lazy, and very dated.

He's even worse with classical mytholgy, laying on the explanations with a trowel. He keeps interrupting his flow to explain about Kronos, Aphrodite, the Furies, etc, which is tedious. And every time he names the boy Asamam, he reminds us it means "sky". As for the weak puns that he can never resist, he needs an editor who will stand up to him. James Joyce did the puns well enough: we don't need people going "Finnegan, wake!" just to prove they've read the book, it adds nothing.

If this was a first novel by some nervous accountant, who'd care? But this guy is supposed to stand for literature today. He dines out on it.

It's as though Rushdie is so desperate to show he can "do" pop culture, after years in the library and at publishing events, that he throws himself into it without being able to distinguish class from (...crud). Listing things he's read in the New York Post isn't good enough. Like the made-up pop stars in "Ground", there's something dated, Michael Jacksonish about the Little Brain "phenomenon". Just saying a character "guest hosts the Letterman show" is not enough to make the blood race. And just saying the professor's friend Waterford-Wadja was the "Derridada" of Britain doesn't mean much either unless you make an effort to show *how*.

As for the slapstick moments, when men bump into things while looking at the beautiful woman with the scar? New York City didn't need magical realising. Rushdie loves the symbolism of flying Westward: let's see how he does when he gets to LA.

I hope his next book will be written a bit more carefully. Rushed - and there's a Salman-quality pun - is not the same as spontaneous.
JG
PS Lose the bouncy castle climax.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book, but a disappointing Rushdie book.
Review: With Rushdie, it is difficult to avoid taking into account the sheer magnificance of other older works when reviewing or discussing 'Fury' and his other, more recent novels.

And thus, while this is a brillantly crafted and executed novel, razor sharp with an objective portrayal of a variety of characters, it was somewhat of a disappointment, and a break away from the Magic Realism of 'The Moor's Last Sigh' and 'Midnight's Children' of which Rushdie does best.

I felt that Rushdie's gritty fury filled New York setting was superbly portrayed, and like previous reviewers, found a seriously apocalyptic element to the work, and the fury developing within the city and the world at large. This was particularly accentuated by the cussing taxi driver and I can also see an element of 'King Lear' in the sticky surrounding and its mirroring of the character's inner chaos.

However, also like previous reviewers, I felt Rushdie's attempts to westernise his work with references of well know writers, films etc lacked a certain tact and delicacy that Rushdie has become known for. It seemed almost an attempt to prove that Rushdie himself had given in to the Western world.

I found the climatic and insightful conclusion to be a highlight of the novel, and this amazing finishing seems to be one of the only things that Rushdie has brought to his new work.

This is a harder, leaner, more realistic and incrasingly gritty novel, and I would be inclined to say not one of his better works, though is an interesting and worthwhile read from an objective viewpoint or someone who is yet to experience the beauty that is 'The Moor's Last Sigh' etc.

Rating:
Summary: My first Rushdie... and I just ordered 2 more
Review: I'll admit, I bought it as a curiosity. I didn't know what to expect. I read it was based in NYC (I live there) and I remembered the whole ordeal with the price on his head... and decided what the hell.

It is amazing. He captures the exact feeling of the city that hot and humid summer. He tells a captivating story of anger, depression, hope, love, and self-(re)discovery that covers a familiar plot in such a captivating new way. I can't wait to read his other books.

Rating:
Summary: PORTENTS OR PRETENSE?
Review: .

Does this Rushdie guy fancy himself as a re-incarnated Old Testament prophet or what? In << Fury >>, he certainly gives the Summer of 2000 in New York City the old Sodom and Gomorrah treatment.

To really get into this book it pays to have a dictionary of classical Greek mythology handy. All the references to residents of Olympus such as Kronos (aka Old Father Time with his scythe who does the deed on his daughter) and other sundry deities and demons may need a bit of explaining.

Similarly, Old Bill the Bard gets a fair workout as well. Rushdie lifts lines from Shakespeare's plays (often without attribution). I guess this is OK since Bill's been dead 400 years, and nobody reads him now anyway.

Rushdie uses the dramatic devices seen in << King Lear >>, where the madness of the principle protagonist, is mirrored by the chaos and storms in his surrounding physical world.

Rushdie, like his hero Malik Solanka has an obvious love-hate relationship with NYC and the USA. He is charmed and intoxicated by the vibrancy and creativity of the city and the culture it breeds, but at the same time is repelled by the decadent, transient vicariousness of it all.

Some excerpts from << Fury >> show how close Rushdie came to forecasting the mid-summer madness of the first year of Millennia III.

On p.44 his observation " America, in the highest hour of its hybrid, omnivorous power" is compared to "the last days of Rome".

We have Solanka riding in a cab, and with his knowledge of the Urdu language understands the blasphemies and curses of Ali the newly emigrated Pakistani taxi-driver. When Ali screams at other road users, Solanka (or more likely Rushdie) sees "... some misguided collectivist spirit of paranoiac pan-Islamic solidarity, he blamed all New York road users for the tribulations of the Muslim world".

The spookiest paragraph in the book is on p114.

"A Concorde crashed in France, and people imagined they saw a part of their own dreams of the future, the future in which they too would break through the barriers that had held them back, the imaginary future of their own limitlessness, going up in those awful flames".

Rushdie's incorporation of mid-2000 contemporary events both as background and central scenes gives a strong immediacy to the novel. He even takes us to the South Pacific, where a thinly disguised Fiji and the coup it experienced last year becomes a pivotal event in the denouement of the story.

However, once our lead character escapes the realities and intensities of New York, the narrative descends rapidly into melodrama. After all the real-time buzz and credible scenes of the front end of the story, the cathartic nemeses we expect of a classical scholar like Rushdie, arrive far too predicably.

In the book, we have Rushdie and his characters, considering the possibilities of open-ended, collaborative, cyberspace linked, story telling and game playing.

Perhaps the author should have put down his pen for 12 months in mid-2000, and let the realities of 2001 complete the story for him.

Rating:
Summary: A misfire from a master
Review: Salman Rushdie has written enough excellent novels that his lackluster efforts (such as his non-fictional JAGUAR SMILE) are rejected with disproportionate enmity, even howls of rage. One British journalist went so far as to write, in a comment on Rushdie's sudden relocation to America, that this routine award-winner was only defecting because no one in England was buying his "lousy" books anymore.

FURY is not his finest. It lacks Rushdie's distinctive style, a storytelling voice that bubbles and delights with wordplay and dances with idioms in English and Hindustani. It is eclipsed, here, by another agenda: a self-conscious anxiety to prove familiarity with American culture. Malik Solanka's, and probably author Rushdie's, view of New York City is limited to the privileged neighborhood he frequents - and the understanding of American culture feels compressed, a digest of America via CNN and the Entertainment Channel. Intellectually, we are being fed fast food here. The observations of American life are facile: the USA does not consider the consequences of its policies; capitalism is a fanatical religion; men are afraid of women's sensuality; America has race issues. Rushdie's critical analysis rests on shallow observations (well, after all, he is new in town).

The novel sets up a confrontation with a deep, mysterious anger - an eternal human rage - that disappears in an unsatisfactory perfume of sentimentality. "Love conquers all," and so we are left to chew on a rather strained fantasy about a fictional civil war, and an uninteresting remnant of Solanka's science-fiction story.

Rating:
Summary: Playful Vituperation of Human Folly
Review: This book should be savored, not for its plot, but for the narrator's delicious critique of all that is foolish. The aging melancholy, dyspeptic professor is both immersed in New York and alienated from it as he analyzes all that is around him during the summer of 2000 when among other things there is national hysteria over the Elian Gonzalez case. For me the treat of this novel is not the story line but Rushdie's diatribes against human idiocy. For example he succinctly derides the sentimental brutishness of the Elian worshippers in a way that made me laugh and say to myself, "Why didn't I write that?" I kept doing this as I read the novel, envying Rushdie for his ability to articulate human foolishness in all its magnitude. This book is a profoundly beautiful satire where Rushdie combines the topical with the mythical and makes it look easy. I've tried to read three Rushdie books before and couldn't finish them. This book is an exception.

Rating:
Summary: The Rushdie Jinx
Review: Will someone please tell Mr Rushdie to choose his subjects with caution! There seems to be something ominous about his books: their release is invariably followed by a violent aftermath. The world seems to turn topsy-turvey, all hell breaks loose. No exaggeration, this. The jinx may be traced back to Midnight's Children where, in a semi-facetious mode the author narrates how a nonsense doggerel chanted by a child ("Soo ché? Saru ché. Danda le ke maru ché.") starts off a large-scale communal riot. That Rushdie himself, the enfante terrible, thumbing his nose and singing his Satanic Verses, was to spark off a similar violence is history we are familiar with. About a decade later, his The Ground Beneath Her Feet was all about earthquakes. It is uncanny but immediately after its release there were seismic upheavals in the Indian subcontinent, earthquakes, landslides, and destruction on a massive scale. Sure, it could be coincidence again.

Now it happens again with his latest book. Fury: A Novel is released in the first week of September 2001. It speaks of a metaphoric fury raging through the city of New York, engulfing all its inhabitants - a fury of lust, greed, and viciousness. Again, eerily, within days of its release, literature is transformed into grim reality and a literal - not figurative - diabolic fury descends on New York City from the skies, smashing its tallest buildings, leaving indelible scars on the mindscape of its people!

It is hard to contain the feeling of nostalgia that overwhelms the reader who goes through the book. Salman Rushdie presents in graphic detail the hum of life in the Big Apple that was before the twin towers in South Manhattan were attacked from the skies, before the city was brutally assaulted, its imposing skyline ravaged for all times to come. In the wake of the collapse of the trade towers it is tempting to read the book as both, a dirge and also a hope for renewal, a prayer for a new world without any fiendish Furies, a world closer to the heart's desire!