Fury

Rating:
Summary: Top Stuff
Review: There are rare occasions when you pick up a book which seems precisely to sum up the moment in which you're living, which encapsulates a view of the world which you realise you have been forming in your own incomplete and somewhat random manner. Such was the case with "Fury". I doubt that it would have made such an impact on me had I read it, say, two years from now. Its very topicality is both its present strength and perhaps its future weakness - it evokes the moment so well that when the moment has passed its relevance will no doubt diminish.

"Fury" is centred on Malik Solanka, who has moved to New York from London, in part to escape his increasingly complicated and unfulfilling private life, in part to find a new impetus to his life as a whole. To do this, Solanka has to struggle with his own "furies" (passions, past, frustrations, angers and so on), but also with New York's furies (New York is symbolic of/the epitome of Western society as a whole).

It is this examination of the tensions within Western society that I found most disturbing and fascinating. For Rushdie, it seemed to me, we have been washed up on a dirty beach by the tidal wave of 1980s materialism. We "mistake wealth for riches", are slaves to fads and fashion (becoming robots in the process), drown in a sea of inanity in the belief that we are enjoying ourselves, pollute the air with noise when we think we are "communicating" by mobile phone, play a game in which only the "winners" will do despite the fact that in life the vast majority of people have to make compromises (because only the minority can ever "win").

It's a society screaming with rage at itself because it cannot deliver what it purports to be able to deliver - material wealth has not made society as a whole more at ease with itself, nor has it given individuals more of a sense of meaning to their lives. The disappointments are huge because the promises are so large. And, most importantly, given the tragic events of 11th September, it cannot insulate against disaster and the rage of others - Rushdie's descriptions of the irate Muslim taxi driver in New York are chillingly prescient.

No doubt this book will not be to the taste of many - much of it feels very derivative (shades of Easton Ellis, Nabokov etc) and there are sections where Rushdie seems to be showing off his wide knowledge of current events/trends. Yet for all its faults, it gets top marks for its impact on me. Just in case this analysis seems fanciful - a true story of a conversation between two newspapermen I overheard in a London pub. One asked the other how he'd heard of the disaster in New York. The answer was:

"Well, yeah, I didn't know until about three in the afternoon when somebody came in and told me it was on the Internet. So I went in straight away and saw it there, and I remember saying, God this is big. I mean really big - this could be as big as the death of Diana, I mean we could increase our circulation by a third on the back of this."

Human life reduced to monetary terms. Top marks Salman.

Rating:
Summary: Signifying Nothing
Review: Having moved to New York from London last year, Salman Rushdie has been quick to turn his American experiences into a novel. “Fury” is set unmistakably in Manhattan during the summer of 2000. “Gladiator” is playing in cinemas and around America trundle “the motorcades of two largely interchangeable and certainly unlovable presidential candidates”.

“Fury” pursues a theme which will be familiar to readers of “The Satanic Verses” and “Shame”—the increasing confusion between image and reality in the late-capitalist world. Unfortunately, in “Fury” this theme seems to have confused Mr Rushdie himself: the plot lines barely link up with each other and the dogleg into magical realism is perplexing and ineffective.

If “Fury” is Mr Rushdie's bid to write a Great American Novel, he has been brought low in the attempt. Although “Fury” starts well, combining acuity of description with thumping readability, it soon loses its way. Mr Rushdie is usually too effervescent a writer to be pompous, but here he is drawn into making overwrought and grandiose pronouncements on the state of America. His narrative voice slides frequently into portentousness. “Fury—sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal—drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction.” So Mr Rushdie tells us, but he does not prove his flurry of words. Less furious than spurious, this will not be counted one of his best books.
From The Economist.

Rating:
Summary: Lost in the Big Apple
Review: In the year 1956, the Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, presented a memorable picture of America at its chaotic best in his Howl. Now, in 2001, it is Salman Rushdie who accomplishes a similar feat in his latest novel.

Solanka's escape brings to mind Rip Van Winkle as he enacts every man's fantasy of leaving all mundane responsibilities to freak out footloose and fancy free. Had the Furies not been in the picture, such an exit would have been an attractive proposition but this escape is related to 'sanyas'. Try as he may, Rushdie can never shake off his "Indiannness". His sensibility is far too deeply rooted in the country of his birth to pull out completely, notwithstanding his emotional goodbye to India in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Solanka's escape, related to the Hindu vanprastha idea is, however, adapted to the contemporary scene where it is no longer possible to retreat to wooded mountains. The fugitive must, instead, retreat into the anonymity of New York which becomes a microcosm of the big bad world.

For Malik Solanka, a broken man looking for solutions, help arrives miraculously in the form of an ethereal creature of traffic-stopping beauty, with whom the ravaged unheroic hero of the novel falls immediately and irrevocably in love. She is the one destined to lift him out of the nadir of despair so that once again the creative juices flow. Solanka will write again, and the demons will finally be defeated. Yes, the story echoes the author's earlier work, a Peter Pan / Hook re-work called Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

The world of Fury is a surrealistic world hovering between dream and reality. The real world in which Solanka lives merges with that of his imagination, peopled by his stories, the imaginary dolls, their separate lives and destinies. There are reverberations from Lolita, shades of the Pygmalion complex, of E.L. Doctorow and his Ragtime, of Harry Potter, Barbie, the Beanie babies, et. al. They all have a place in the popular culture of NYC which, ironically, may seem as esoteric and hocus-pocus as voodoo to the uninitiated outsider.

A quick read of the novel is just not possible. Every sentence, every idea, every word matters. There is a method underlying the madness, the apparent digressions, the mayhem, the confusion. Just as Solanka carves, whittles, and shapes his dolls, so does Rushdie hone his craft to such a point that the unsuspecting reader is buffeted on a torrent of words, images and stories that flows unstoppably from page to page. His craft is that of a puppeteer deftly manipulating many strings.

If the novel is about Solanka's escape, it simultaneously underscores the impossibility of running away from demons - real or imaginary - that haunt us. They are with us, so the cure lies within. If one is fortunate, solutions may appear through the redeeming power of love. When love comes to Solanka's rescue we are reminded of the guiding light of Beatrice as Dante picks his tedious way through the circles of Inferno. Not surprisingly, Solanka's Beatrice is of Indian origin, reiterating Rushdie's return to his roots.

Thus, Fury, paradoxically, turns out to be about the redeeming power of love. Comparable to Allen Ginsberg's Howl, it is a howl to the skies, a dirge on the crass materialism of contemporary life. At the same time, it is a Romantic's plea for love and compassion in a world gone awry with greed and lust, where there is neither peace nor calm nor help for pain. It is a prayer for a new world without any Furies, a world based on positive values where there is still promise, still some hope for the wounded soul of man.

Rating:
Summary: What Is Real?
Review: It takes time and distance to perceive what is real about one's world. In Fury, Rushdie's protagonist -- like the author -- was born in Bombay and has spent his adult life in England until he flees in his 50s to New York City. A former Cambridge don, Malik Solanka has left behind his second wife and 3-year-old son and brought with him a doll Little Brain. This female time-traveling doll was "smart, sassy, unafraid, ... an agent provocateur with a time machine" who inspired a BBC program that provides royalties that enable Solanka to sublet a New York apartment for $8,000 a month and spend his afternoons and evenings wandering the city where he catches the intimate stories of people talking on their cell phones and ponders the identity of a serial killer stalking blonde society girls who look like Barbie dolls. A young neighbor in New York reminds Solanka of Little Brain and understands his angst at losing creative control of his creation.

Mila Milo is a web site developer and helps him renew his creative energy. She is excited about "the cool science fiction figures you've been coming up with: the mad cyberneticist, the drowning planet idea, the cyborgs versus the lotus-eaters from the other side of the world, the fight to the death between the counterfeit and the real."

He reminds Mila of her adored late father. Then enters Neela Mahendra who is drop-dead beautiful whose South Pacific ancestors came from India. Neela is the mistress of a celebrity black journalist. Jack Rhinehart has hopes of being part of the circle of the men who dated the ill-fated blonde society girls who looked like Barbie dolls.

Neela entices Solanka half way around the world where he has an encounter with his web fantasy becoming real.

Throughout the novel, Rushdie makes us ponder just what kind of world we want to be creating.

Rating:
Summary: Accessible Rushdie
Review: Why are people in the prosperous, constantly stimulating, world of material plentitude and endless opportunities that is America in the late 1990's so filled with fury? What happens to artistry in a world of global communications? What happens when a character you've created becomes commodified, commercialized, watered down, and transmogrified into a global icon you hate?

In 259 pages of energetic, sometimes frenetic and breathtaking prose, Rushdie explores these and other questions as he tells us the story of Malik Solanka, an ex-professor turned television scriptwriter who has somewhere along the line turned into a very angry man. He was never a particularly even-tempered fellow--one of his friends reminds him that he once threw someone out of his house for misquoting Philip Larkin--but now his constant, gnawing, soul-sapping fury has driven him to the point where he fears he will become violent. When we first meet Solanka, he has already fled from his family in England to America, fearing for their safety if he stays. America, however, does not prove much of a solution, as he is constantly provoked by the loudness, by American mannerisms, by American culture. Watching TV news coverage of the Elian Gonzalez story is enough to make the red ball of anger in him rise again, as does the American "cultural hypersensitivity, this almost pathological fear of giving offense," as does the cultural inauthenticity of a pseudo-Viennese Kaffeehaus where the counter staff doesn't even recognize the word "Linzertorte."

This novel has passages of linguistic gymnastics and cultural play worthy of the best of Rushdie, and I would certainly recommend reading it. The verbal fun and the acuity of Rushdie's vision of America is dead-on in so many places, and you will find yourself laughing and nodding in recognition as he describes people having loud cell phone discussions about very personal topics in public places, for example, and his riffs on everything from literary academic stars to advertising culture. The doll he created, Little Brain, is also terrific, at least in her original incarnation: Solanka's idea was that she should be sassy time-traveler who would interview the great thinkers of the past. You got to love a woman who gives Galileo flak.

Although there are many reasons to read and love this book, this novel is not quite a first-tier Rushdie. It is surprisingly plot-heavy for such a short book, and some of its sub-plots are a bit hackneyed. Murders of the rich and beautiful, TWO cases of incest, a third-world coup by a megalomaniac leader--while Rushdie gets some good material out of these plot threads, these stories don't have the energy that usually permeates every nook and cranny of a Rushdie novel. I also have some reservations about the conclusion. What exactly has Solanka learned over the course of his adventures, and how is this embodied in his final actions? This ending is far more equivocal and, I think, despairing than those of many of Rushdie's fictions.

While this is not the best novel Rushdie has ever written, it is nonetheless decidedly worth reading. Read it for its (as always) interesting protagonist and its raw, witty insights into life in contemporary America. This is Rushdie's _The Way We Live Now_.

Rating:
Summary: More Classic Rushdie
Review: Already being a huge fan of Mr. Rushdie I tracked down an Advance Reader's Copy of Fury a couple of months back. The extra work was definitely worth it. Fury is more classic Rushdie. Fury, like The Ground Beneath Her Feet before it, is set mainly in the United States, New York City to be exact, and is filled with references to American culture. Fury is quite a bit shorter in length then most recent Rushdie offerings but a whole lot of ideas and story are packed into this small space.

The book follows Malik Solanka, protagonist?, on his quest to escape himself. Malik abandons his wife and child in London to live alone in New York. Malik's time in New York brings him into contact with the usual selection of bizarre Rushdie characters. Malik is a very angry man. This anger is appeased somewhat by Malik's odd relationship with a young woman who reminds him of his own invention, a very popular doll. Malik is frequently plagued by extended blackouts and is worried that he may be the perpetrator of a series of brutal murders. I will not give away the secret but suffice to say that it fits in well with the rest of the novel.

The bottom line is that if you have previously enjoyed Rushdie's works you will in all likelihood also enjoy Fury. If you have never read any of Rushdie's novels before I recommend starting with Midnight's Children.

Rating:
Summary: The Doll-Man Cometh
Review: This novel consists of the thoughts, impressions, and actions of one Professor Malik Solanka, rich and marginally famous from his invention and marketing of the Little Brain dolls, recent émigré to New York, a middle-aged man fleeing his past life and loves and trapped in an internal argument with his own emotions, living with alcohol and gaps in his memory.

And for the first ninety pages of this book, this portrait of the Professor and his observations about the various ills of the American culture is all we get. There is no action. There is little explication of his earlier life. There are a large number of very facile remarks about the culture, the economy, the generation gap, political non-competence, about the true rulers of the world. And we are treated to the first cornerstone of Rushdie's theme, Solanka's uncontrolled personal fury, striking out at himself and innocent by-standers.

If this was all there was to the book, yet another look at a marginally psychotic, conflicted individual, it really wouldn't have been worth reading. Rushdie is too good a writer to fall into that trap, however, and having gotten in his licks at the American culture as he sees it, the real story can now begin. Starting with a rather unusual affair with the queen of a group gen-Xers, we are treated to an exploration of the mental effects of incest and gather some additional insight into the items that helped formed Solanka's character and his current problems. Unfortunately, incest is treated here as an absolute evil, with no exploration of alternative cultural modalities and relative levels of sin, things which would have improved the point of this section. As an outgrowth of this affair, the Professor is inspired to start a new project, and interactive web-based science fiction story.

As a story-within-a-story, this is no better than grade B pulp from the fifties. As an allegory for later events in the book and as another model for his theme, it serves a significant purpose, and it is quite believable that such a story would become immensely popular, putting the Professor back in the limelight and in contact with people from his earlier life. Here we finally get to look at the whole man, and even if it is not a very pretty picture, it is at least comprehensible.

The last section of the book is yet another level of allegory, forcefully stating in yet one more way Rushdie's theme of fury being the driving force behind creativity, murder, heroes and cowards, world domination and the battle of the sexes.

Rushdie peppers his prose with multiple literary, personality, and event references. While most of the time such references add to the content and ambience of the story, there are places here where I felt it was overdone, to where I felt that Rushdie was showing off, rather than trying to advance or add to the story. Characterization for anyone except Solanka is very sketchy, and occasionally there are characters introduced, given a fair amount of development space, and then effectively dropped from the story.

The various levels of story and allegory bounce against each other, giving more depth to this book than would otherwise have been present, but at the same time I found most of it too obvious, on par with Rushdie's too easy observations and criticisms of American culture, with a net feeling of skating on a lake, thinking the ice is all there is, when the real depth is there below your feet, if you could just get to it. As it is, this story's potential excellence remains locked below the ice, and we are left with the mild entertainment of skating in circles and figure-eights.

Rating:
Summary: Response to Peter Wild--i think you've missed the pt.
Review: I dont think Peter Wild has a fundamental enough grasp of Rushdie's work to be called into the "spotlight review" by Amazon though he is a person and entitled to an opinion. The fact is this is *not* the same type of work Rushdie has done in the past--it is not nearly so grand or as "magical"--so I dont think you should be putting it on that same level of comparison. This is an entirely different animal.

"Fury" is an impressive work nonetheless. Rushdie has long been known by himself and others as a "metropolitan intellectual" and his primary concern is with this interaction b/w city environs and the individual and how one's personal identity can be transformed, shifted, literally "translated" from one continent to the next. This is no different. Rushdie's characters have always relied on this premise of *metamorphosis* and building an alchemist's substance into the character as he progresses from one state to the next. This is a fascinating process and it continues to be one of the major aspiring reasons why his work continues to be read.

I don't think it's fair to accuse Rushdie of being some secondhand Roth rip-off. Philip Roth, as much as Salman Rushdie, deals with personal identity issues and the conflicts that ensue against the forces that try to shut them up. In this regard, I actually consider them very much the same in drawing up this process of *self-identity*. It's important, and people want to know this. Rushdie and Roth are both in the same company when it comes to affirming an individual against oppressionist forces, be they conservative Jews or fundamentalist Muslims.

But back to the work, "Fury" is an interesting work, not really for its departure from his previous more grander novels, but for its brevity and realism. The fact that Rushdie uses a larger part of the novel to depict a time, a cultural ethos, a *place*, much as James Joyce or Charles Dickens do, should not come as a shock, or at least not as an unpleasurable one. Rushdie is entitled, as much as any other author of his age, to depict the "realism" of a modern New York and I say he does so in ravishing good taste. The whole point of the fantastical element--the toy figures and fetishizations with dolls-- are, ok, silly at times, if wholly unbelievable, but *that's* the element which allows the imagination its license to work on the reality. Rushdie is not trying to make it all realistic, he's only setting a background out of which surrealistic events and craziness may possibly abound--such is his view that not all of modern life is "real." A lot of it actually is "unreal" and it's this "unreality" that reveals the greater truth about modern living--it just blows your mind sometimes.

Rushdie writes in the tradition of Jorge Borges, or Kafka: the imagination is how you reveal a deeper truth, a quality "more everlasting" than could be conveyed by conventional space and time. Vonnegut was the same. You have to allow Rushdie this license to create surrealism out of the real, or else you've missed the pt. entirely.

"Fury" should be read, not because it's important or pleasurable (though it is often) or because it's from a celeb writer, but for its three/four/five-dimensionality. It is a book that will bend the bounds of conventional thought if you allow it. Just think about the symbology or the characterizations more closely and you might possibly see the collision of two simultaneous worlds--one of the immensely poor and the fancifully rich, the ghetto and the high-class, the carnal sexual desires with a safe, secure marriage-- you will *see* how this conflict arises into fury. You will *see* how this torn-ness can result in escape or a "rip" in the fabric of normalcy. It's important to see how this dynamic works.

I've enjoyed all of Rushdie's other works and I did enjoy this one as well. The fact that it is shorter should be an obvious sign that this is not the same type of story, it's not an epic. It is, however, an enthralling tale that will make the imagination soar. As usual.

Rating:
Summary: Contrived and disappointing
Review: This is the first novel by Rushdie that I have read, though I am sure it will not be the last. Having never read Rushdie, I was first very impressed with his skill with the written word. His plays on words, his ability to make sentences dance easily justify his reputation as one of the great living authors of in the English language; yet I feel there is something lacking in Fury.

The novel paints a very good collection of sympathetic and interesting characters. The protagonist and his dolls and his mid-life/existential/marital crisis. The young, precocious, and unbelievably gorgeous woman who teases him into a great burst of creativity. Masterfully done. But it is the setting of Fury that ultimately makes it a questionable read. Set in New York City in the summer of 2000, Rushdie smothers the narrative with pop-culture references from that season to an amazing degree. References to Hillary Clinton and Mayor Giuliani, to the movies Chicken Run and Gladiator, to an aside about the 'I Love You' computer virus that I had all but forgotten about. Imagine how over peoples heads this read will be in fifteen years time. Which is a shame because if it was tweaked in certain degrees I do believe it could last the test of time like most great literature.

But then there goes Rushdie dipping into the realm of Tom Clancy when the novel sways from the tale of a lost middle-aged man to a military revolution on a small island nation in the Pacific. I let the narrative take me along with that one, thinking perhaps it is literary allegory and I should take something from it because this is high modern literature, but somehow I feel it was way over the top for a story that was doing so well as an intimate portrait of a few very interesting characters.

Rating:
Summary: More like 3.5 stars, but worth reading
Review: Knowing Rushdie's rep, I figured I'd give it a whirl, since it sounded interesting and promised to bring alive my favorite city. Well, it did to an extent--Rushdie's ruminations on what it means to be American and alive in the 21st Century are often right on target, and usually interesting. His portrait of Malik Solanka, ex-professor, famous dollmaker and generally screwed-up guy is also very rich--he was written very well, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching him interact with his environment.

With that said, this book has its definite faults. For one thing: The beginning of the book is kind've a set-up, in which Rushdie is really sketching out Solanka and his environment, and this was really my favorite part. However, one gets the impression it's going to be a setup for a dynamic, gripping story that packs an emotional punch.

In the end, it does pack this punch, but there are sections--large sections--that just drag. Partially, this is due to Rushdie's tendencies towards wordplay and referencing cultural icons from Wall Street to Mount Olympus. At times it's interesting to read the stuff this guy can reel off; other times, I began to wonder if he was trying a little too hard to impress readers. While it is a bit gratuitous, his cultural referencing is always fiercely intelligent, at least.

I was a touch disappointed when I saw the direction he was taking things (perhaps after the first hundred pges my expectations were too high). There were a couple times when I lost interest in a big way, but kept reading, and I'm pretty much glad I did. There are some big flaws in this work, but by the end of the book all things become a bit clearer, both in Solanka's behavior and Rushdie's ideas, and my appreciation grew. All in all, I thought it was interesting enough to read, although it might take some work at times. Remember, this book is more of a "think piece" rather than a driving narrative. I'd recommend it to people who would appreciate that type of writing, as it's not for everybody.