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Loading... Fury: A Novel (Modern Library) (original 2001; edition 2002)by Salman Rushdie
Work InformationFury by Salman Rushdie (2001)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. got in 2016 at an author talk iirc? 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. Reason read:ASIAN BOOK CHALLENGE - DECEMBER 2022 - THE ASIAN DIASPORA, ROOT, 1001 This book is copyright 2001 and is the story of a man who has left his wife and son and is living in New York because of a fury that scared him. He finds himself still full of fury in a city full of fury. There is a good story here but I also was put off by blue language which I guess can convey fury, also sexual content which should not convey fury but also can. There are bits of culture of the change of the century to be found as well as sprinkling of literature, music, and a very nice list of Golden Age Science Fiction authors.
Set mostly in New York Fury is perhaps the fruit of Rushdie’s move to the US after the restrictions necessitated by the fatwā made life in the UK less than congenial for him. It is not a vintage work, no Midnight’s Children nor Shame. Too much is told, not shown. It also begins inauspiciously; with a very Dan Brownesque first sentence, “Professor Malik Solanka, retired historian of ideas, irascible dollmaker, and since his fifty-fifth birthday celibate and solitary by his own (much criticised) choice, in his silvered years found himself living in a golden age.” Now, it could be said that Rushdie is playing with the reader, essaying a fable, but, really, three of those crudely dumped slivers of information are examples of newspaper prose and the knowledge they bring us ought to have emerged more organically during the course of the novel. The novel deals with Solanka’s life after leaving his second wife. He was so full of fury he had almost killed her and their young son and he fled to New York to escape that horror becoming reality. He was also the creator of a TV series in which a doll called Little Brain hosted a kind of chat show where various historical and philosophical figures were interviewed. It became a cult hit, was taken up further, spawning the usual commercial opportunities attendant on success, but in the process was dumbed down. The doll masks which are one of the manifestations of the show’s popularity later become a plot point. Rushdie’s usual scatter shot referencing is present, not only to the Erinyes (Furies) of Greek myth - along with allusions to more popular culture - but also copious descriptions of SF stories (eg The Nine Billon Names of God) and films (Solaris, even - heaven help us - Star Wars.) The three Furies have their counterparts in the three women whom Solanka is involved with in the course of the book. There is a sub-plot involving a republic known as Lilliput-Blefescu (where the doll masks take on a political significance) and which allows Rushdie ample scope for Swiftian allusions. As a novel, Fury is too tied up in itself. Rushdie is riffing on his concerns but here his orotund, fabular style is distracting, the characters are not as rounded as in his earlier works and the plot not as engaging.
Malik Solanka, a middle-aged ex-philosophy professor and millionaire creator of a hugely popular doll, seeks refuge from his unwanted fame and disintegrating marriage in New York City. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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