Fury

A revamp of the tired old formula of the professor-as-victim novel, a Herzog for the 21st century, but with a very Rushdie twist to it. Definitely not one of his major works, but an entertaining read, cleverly pitched just a tiny bit beyond the conventions of realism. There is some lively satire of the shallowness of early 21st century values and some splendidly overdone running jokes. Rushdie is well aware of the old rule that showing a man slipping on a banana-skin or stepping on a rake gets funnier the more often it is repeated. In this case, we have the absurdly beautiful woman who makes men trip over their feet or walk into street furniture whenever she goes out in public: Rushdie doesn't just use this as a throwaway observation of show more another character, but actually shows her doing it every time she appears, even in the big, serious confrontation scene in the penultimate chapter.

There are plenty of references to Bellow's classic (which struck me because I coincidentally read Herzog a few days ago), not least in the names — a Malik is a king and a Herzog is a duke, and it can't be coincidence that one is Moses and the other "Solly". Herzog and Fury are also the only novels in which I can recall coming across the Yiddish word "landsman". Whilst both Bellow and Rushdie start out with a professor who has run away from his wife and child, Rushdie inevitably takes the story — and the resulting balance of power between the sexes — in a completely different direction from Bellow's conventional 1960s approach. show less

Salman Rushdie uses words the way some 4-year-olds use Play-Doh: squeeze it, mold it, roll it, braid it and, in a few cases, eat it. Language is pliable in Mr. Rushdie’s hands; syllables stretch, vowels leap to new heights, consonants turn cartwheels.

You can see what he does with prose on every page of his new novel, Fury. It is a festering boil of a book—restless, energetic and, yes, furious. This is Rushdie’s letter to America and it is full of vitriol. It’s also one of his slimmest, weighing in around 260 pages. But don’t let size fool you—this is compact, complex and condensed magical realism at its best.

The cast of characters sometimes comes off as types to be used at Rushdie’s disposal to put forth his big, boiling show more ideas. They are as much puppets as they are people. After all, no one in real life speaks in gargantuan monologues that go on for pages; but realism hardly seems to matter when we settle in with Rushdie. Sometimes it’s a welcome relief to read Play-Doh literature.

The author moved to this country at the beginning of 2000 and Fury takes on an autobiographical slant as its protagonist, Malik Solanka, also moves here from England (no fatwa nipping at the character’s heels, though). Other novels (The Ground Beneath Her Feet) have had U.S. settings, but this is the first of his which can truly be called American. Like a modern de Tocqueville, Rushdie has taken notes on America, from sea to shining sea, and has set his observations loose on the page.

Here, we get pages and pages of jazz-like riffs on everything from Elian Gonzalez to the presidential contest between “Gush and Bore.�€? This is a time capsule for the first few days of our new millennium and it’s about as perfect as they come. (Though I do have to wonder: Because this is a novel loaded with contemporary references, it’s difficult to determine how future readers will appreciate it. It’s thrilling pop cult music to our ears, but 100—or even 25—years from now, they’re going to need a lot of footnotes.)

Fury is about Professor Solanka’s Summer of 2000 in New York City. He’s come there to sort things out after abandoning his wife and young son back in London. He is plagued by feelings of intense anger, triggered by a word here or a word there, which rise up like inner volcanoes and it’s all he can do to keep himself in check. Like a roving camera, the narrative follows the 55-year-old Solanka as he walks the mean streets teeming with angry cab drivers and rap-talking stoop-loungers. Solanka has a lot to think about—he’s a celebrity puppeteer whose creation, Little Brain, has become a victim of commercialization, and then there’s the failed marriage of his close friend, not to mention his own withering relationship with his wife and son. Solanka bounces like a pinball from one torment to the next.

But what Fury is about is less important than what it is. The novel is paced like a long monologue of someone trying to get all the words out before a blood vessel bursts in his forehead. In fact, it sounds very much like a sweaty-browed, spittle-spitting participant at a poetry slam. Just listen:

Everybody, as well as everything, was for sale. Advertisements had become colossi, clambering like Kong up the walls of buildings. What was more, they were loved. When he was watching TV, Solanka still turned the sound down at commercial breaks, but everyone else, he was sure, turned it up. The girls in the ads—Esther, Bridget, Elizabeth, Halle, Gisele, Tyra, Isis, Aphrodite, Kate—were more desirable than the actresses in the show in between; hell, the guys in the ads—Mark Vanderloo, Marcus Schenkenberg, Marcus, Aurelius, Marc Antony, Marky Mark—were more desirable than the actresses in the shows. And as well as presenting the dream of an ideally beautiful America in which all women were babes and all men were Marks, after doing the basic work of selling pizza and SUVs and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, beyond money management and the new ditditdit of the dotcoms, the commercials soothed America’s pain, its head pain, its gas pain, its heartache, its loneliness, the pain of babyhood and old age, of being a parent and of being a child, the pain of manhood and women’s pain, the pain of success and that of failure, the good pain of the athlete and the bad pain of the guilty, the anguish of loneliness and of ignorance, the needle-sharp torment of the cities and the dull, mad ache of the empty plains, the pain of wanting without knowing what was wanted, the agony of the howling void within each watching, semiconscious self.

I apologize: I should have warned you to keep all arms and legs inside the ride at all times. You can unbuckle now and take a few deep breaths if necessary.

Just make sure you have plenty of oxygen on hand when you open Fury. It’s one hell of a ride through Solanka’s mind. He is an angry, impulsive man; but he is also pitiable and, at book’s end, a bit desperate for love and acceptance. Most of the book chronicles Solanka’s attempts to fit himself, the odd puzzle piece, into the mosaic of society. He’s none too successful (“Something was amiss with the worldâ€?), not even in the two relationships he strikes up with two women that summer. He has come to America to erase himself,

To be free of attachment and so also of anger, fear, and pain. Eat me, Professor Solanka silently prayed. Eat me, America, and give me peace.

Instead of being erased, however, he’s like a furious scribble (perhaps done by our 4-year-old who has graduated from Play-Doh). At times, he borders on downright frightening: “He had come in search of silence and found a loudness greater than the one he left behind. The noise was inside him now.â€? Did I mention that there’s a so-called Concrete Killer who’s on the loose, bashing in the heads of young women with chunks of concrete? You’re allowed to shudder when you meet Malik Solanka on the page. A more unsettled—and unsettling—character you aren’t likely to find in this Fall’s lineup of fresh-pressed novels. show less

As always, I am a bit breathless when I finish a novel by Rushdie. The vigor of his ideas and the multitude of analogies he draws from contemporary events, history, and mythology are nothing short of astonishing. This novel, set in New York City, traces one academic man's journey from an existential crisis to efforts to drown out his fury, to his effort to face it and make meaning in his life. In my opinion, this novel is one of the more generally accessible reads because the plot is more clearly discernible than in several of his other works. Per usual, the characters are at once humorous and terrifying in their humanity. So take the ride, by all means, and hold onto your hat. You will run smack into pathos, rage, passion, fear, with a show more smattering of love and hope. Great novel! show less

I am putting this one down. I have vacillated between finishing/not finishing long enough, and reached my decision this morning.

Why put it down? Because it's an exhausting read. It's the non-stop self-pitying rant of an extremely wealthy man who can't find happiness. A man who abandons his wife and son (after thinking seriously of murdering the former) in London for the fury of New York. In a nutshell, he wants the fury of New York to overpower the fury he feels within himself.

What I suspect is a thinly veiled autobiography (and you know how I hate those, Holden Caulfield), Fury is full of beautiful writing and wonderful quotes for publishers about the excess of America. However, it descends quickly into whining. Beautifully written, show more irrepressible whining.

It is not very popular to dislike Rushdie's writing. People think of him as so esoteric, on a different plane, writing at a higher level than most. Perhaps his vocabulary is larger than the average fiction reader, but that only serves to give his writing a sense of arrogance. I can imagine him writing and thinking, "No one understands me. No one will "get" this."

This was the first Rushdie book I have tried, and I will more than likely try another one. After all, perhaps some of his earlier writing, before he was jaded by wealth and beautiful women half his age, will prove to be a bit more accessible for us common folk.

Not recommended. show less

This is the story of Malik Solanka, who is angry. He has a fury inside of him -- a fury that has led to blackouts, which in turn have Malik finding himself shouting in public, and standing over the sleeping bodies of his wife and beloved son with a knife. Partly to protect them, he runs away, but the fury stays with him. He begins to question his sanity, and even wonders if he is the serial killer stalking beautiful young women.

As we learn more about Professor Solanka, and about the women who are part of his life, Salmon Rushdie also has us contemplating modern society and the role than anger plays in actions ranging from personal ambition to civil war.

The main character is a dollmaker and writer, and Mr. Rushdie uses the plots and show more characters he devises to explore the themes of fury more deeply. I must say I was less interested in the goings on on Planet Galileo-1 than in the rest of the novel.

Very well written, and Mr. Rushdie's plays on words were both entertaining and insightful.

Loved the ending, which is like a beginning..... show less

Malik Solanka is mad. Not just irritated or cranky, but filled with fury, and not just his own fury, but the everyman fury that characterises his age. At 55, the Indian born, NY dwelling protagonist of Rushdie's latest novel Fury, has the kind of rage which causes him to stand with a knife over the sleeping bodies of his wife and son, scream in public, and slip between the red heat of anger to blackouts which leave him questioning his sanity and public safety. His anger is also part of the broader anger of the world - the human condition, which prefigures recent terrorist attacks, and hints at the kind of anger which makes anything possible. Fury is used in many contexts in this novel, which is blackly funny, engaging, easy to read, and show more as verbose and modern as anything Rushdie has written. Fury is everything which is evil in man - the mythical flies; ugly sisters; Erinnyes; Eumenides; vengeful wrath: Terror, strife, Lies, Vengeance, Intemperance; Altercation, Fear and Battle. They are the pursuers of Orestes, guilt, hounding those deserving of their hunger. On the simplest level, the fury is Solanka's guilt at leaving behind his 3 year old son Asmaan, who "twisted in him like a knife", his fear of his self, and anger at the unspoken act performed on him by his stepfather long ago. There is also that empty, self-loathing at the heart of a fearful but prosperous America; a land of sitcoms and shopping malls, and superficial everything, leaving a deep and unfulfilled longing. This longing, also the impetus for creation in its highest form, is also part of that fury. Then there is the broader world's fury; the fury of nations and religious fanatics fighting one another. This is the fury which Mila Milo's father flies into - the Serbias and Croatias and Fiji or Lilliput-Blefuscu as Rushdie names it, or the middle east - the anger of a taxi driver screaming obscenities in his mother tongue, or the anger and ugliness of Eddie Ford's father in Nowheresville, Nix. Tragedy; emptiness; murder for kicks, loneliness; death. This is all at the heart of Solanka's fury. While the book is as rich in linguistic skill and wordplay as any of Rushdie's material, there are some problems with Fury. The number of references are so extensive, especially the references to current pop icon figures, that the book threatens to collapse from the number of names dropped. Few cultural icons escape mention, from Al Pacino, Jennifer Lopez (multiple mentions), Puff-Daddy, N'Sync, Lord of the Rings, Butch Cassidy, Madonna, Star Wars, Gandhi, Max Headroom, Tiger Woods, The Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, the Bush and Gore election ("Gush vs Bore"), Finnegan's Wake, Robbe-Grillet, Butor, Amazon books, you name it. Piled into the novel so tightly, the ongoing references are tedious, and strain credulity, rendering the novel so heavily anchored to today, that it may become meaningless within a few years, despite the universality of the themes. In its attempt to assimilate youth culture, and pick up on all of its radio signals, while still continuing to bring together diverse themes such as the nature of academia, myth, history, political conflict, philosophy, fairy tales, children's stories, science fiction, jingles and rock and roll, Rushdie dilutes his story and makes for an overly convoluted book, where the potential richness of its substance is marred by its reliance on known names and linguistic puns. show less

A decent ending didn’t justify the long slog to get there. So much filler—useless and mind-numbing. The bones of the story were good! But that would have made for a short book indeed. So it felt like words were thrown at the wall to fill in spaces between a decent plot. The two main female characters jabbered on and on and were mostly indistinguishable but for their age and race. So it seems Rushdie is not for me.