Salman Rushdie's latest novel is like a mine in which there are a few wonderful gems, but you have to dig through a lot of other stuff to get to them. This is, for example, yet another novel about an alienated middle-aged male intellectual and his sexual obsessions. That's a vein that surely has been played out by now -- wasn't that Philip Roth we met on the way into this mine? Rushdie's 55-year-old protagonist, Malik Solanka, is summering in a funk in New York City. His wife and 3-year-old son are back in London, and Solanka has ''withdrawn into himself'' -- as much as anyone can withdraw when surrounded by the cacophony of New York in the year 2000: The season's hit movie portrayed the decadence of Caesar Joaquin Phoenix's imperial Rome. . . . In New York, too, there were circuses as well as bread: a musical about lovable lions, a bike race on Fifth, Springsteen at the Garden with a song about the forty-one police gunshots that killed innocent Amadou Diallo, the police union's threat to boycott the Boss's concert, Hillary vs. Rudy, a cardinal's funeral, a movie about lovable dinosaurs, the motorcades of two largely interchangeable and certainly unlovable presidential candidates (Gush, Bore), Hillary vs. Rick. . . . Et cetera. There's something stale about that catalog -- it sounds like it was crafted out of a year-in-review issue of Time or Newsweek, right down to the Gush-Bore joke, which was funny for about 30 minutes sometime the middle of last year. But it's possible that the staleness is intentional -- that this glib trip through pop-culture headlines is a correlative for the emptiness of Solanka's soul. When his wife telephones, he drifts into a reverie about new communications technology, wondering if her voice is being transmitted via transoceanic cable or satellite: ''In these days . . . the epoch of analog (which was to say also of the richness of language, of analogy) was giving away to the digital era, the final victory of the numerate over the literate. . . . Professor Solanka listened to the sound of Eleanor's voice and with some distaste imagined itbeing broken up into little parcels of digitized information. . . .'' ''You've gone off inside your head on one of your riffs and the plain fact that your son is ill hasn't even registered,'' Eleanor snaps. And she's right: Solanka's alienation runs deep. Born in Bombay, he was educated in England, where he became a professor of the history of ideas. But, fed up with academic politics, he resigned his tenured position at Cambridge and turned his hobby -- creating dolls -- into a TV project: A BBC series about the history of philosophy, in which dolls representing the philosophers encountered a girl doll called Little Brain, became a cult hit. Moreover, Little Brain became a pop phenomenon, making Solanka rich. But not happy: ''He was James Mason, a falling star, drinking hard, drowning in defeats, and that damn doll was flying high in the Judy Garland role.'' When he finds himself standing over his sleeping wife and child one night, holding a carving knife, he takes the next plane for New York. There he sets out to remake himself: ''Nothing less than the unselfing of the self would do.'' The novel follows Solanka through this ''unselfing'' process, though as you might expect, it's not easy. For Solanka's ''riffs'' take him into a kind of trance state in which he's unconscious of what he's doing and saying. Once, he's thrown out of a cafe for talking loudly and obscenely, when he isn't conscious of having spoken. He even begins to fear that in his blackouts he may be the ''concrete killer,'' responsible for the deaths of three young women whose heads were bashed in with a piece of concrete. Two women then enter his life. One, a young Web designer named Mila Milo (short for Milosevic -- get it?), claims to be a specialist in remaking people. With the other, the stunningly beautiful Neela Mahendra, he has a torrid affair. ''She's one of yours,'' says the friend who introduces Solanka to Neela. ''Indian diaspora. One hundred years of servitude. In the eighteen nineties her ancestors went as indentured laborers to work in what's-its-name. Lilliput-Blefuscu. Now they run the sugarcane production and the economy would fall apart without them, but you know how it is wherever Indians go. People don't like them.'' Eventually, Solanka will wind up in the midst of a revolution in Lilliput-Blefuscu, and a lot of other stuff will happen to him, too. For like Solanka, Rushdie lets his imagination run riot, and a reviewer can only sample the satiric farrago that results. The key to the book lies in its title. Rushdie plays on all the various meanings of fury: Solanka's madness, of course, but also the Furies of classical mythology -- Mila, Neela and Solanka's wife, Eleanor, become identified with these vengeful deities. And fury also can refer to the creative frenzy that Solanka finds himself in. The book might well have been titled ''Solanka Furioso.'' Ever since the Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed the fatwa in 1989 for Rushdie's supposedly anti-Islamic ''The Satanic Verses,'' Rushdie has lived a life hemmed in by bodyguards. Things have gotten easier for him in recent years -- he is currently making appearances in the United States, including several in the Bay Area on Sept. 13, to publicize his new book. But I suspect that his circumscribed life is one reason why, despite its abundant wit, there's something airless about his new novel. ''Fury'' oscillates between brilliance and something a good deal less than brilliant. Borrowing ''Lilliput-Blefuscu'' and other names from Swift's ''Gulliver's Travels'' strikes me as obvious and cutesy, as does the cloying baby talk of Solanka's son. And the portrayal of women in the novel is often gratingly sexist; there's certainly no hint why they all seem to find Solanka so fascinating. Nevertheless, if you stick with ''Fury'' and dig long enough, you'll find the gems.
I’d known before I picked this up that ‘Fury’ was one of his critically most damned works – despite that warning, I gaily went ahead. Because I’m simply in love with the genius of that man. Of the 4 works I’ve read of his, my reactions have ranged from ever-growing adoration (The Moor’s Last Sigh, which I’ve read 9 times in 4 years and will read yet again) to reluctant reading (The Satanic Verses, which has some nuggets of pure brilliance and heady defiance in an otherwise dump of garbage). But never have I encountered such a disastrous piece of fiction, especially by him. Why do I read Rushdie?Because I love his verbal density that draws blood under the garb of comic relief and unapologetic, Bambaiya, forbidden language of lavish absuses. Because he deftly weaves complex layers of satire, story-telling and colonial history into a multi-hued carpet full of motif, signifiers and signs, some of them obscure and some right in-your-face. Because he is irreverent. Because nothing is sacred to him. Because he boldly says what needs to be said, without mincing his words. Because he insults where insults need to be thrown. Because he is rude, crude, bitter, sharp, cynical, unbowed, unfettered – you cannot control him. You cannot deny the truth in his fiction. He breathes fire. Because he cruelly lifts masks off the Grand Narratives about whoever he picks to star in his works. Much of the really beautiful aspects of his works are esoteric – they are references that only people really, deeply aware about India can understand, so I’m not surprised at non-Indians not falling so deeply in love with him.I love people like that – who break taboos, who make me swallow the bitter-tinged filth of my identity when I open my mouth to laugh hard at his explicit expletive-laden language. Because his language is not just a gimmick to shock and scandalize – read between the lines, and there is bitter, biting sarcasm, political satire, loads of historical/cultural references, psychological insights into the era of the setting, the numerous popular-culture references crucial to the shaping of that time. It is a rich, rich tapestry that is clever, deep and entertaining. And to many conservatives, shamelessly offensive. And I love that.But none of it this time. This is not the Rushdie I know and adore. It’s almost like a ghost-writer penning a Rushdie-lookalike, a dummy writer forging a pseudo-Rushdie and failing miserably. This book has no charm, no intriguing layers of history, culture, political commentary, vivid picturing of people, places and their fetishes. Where every single line had a meaning, a reference, a significance in his other works, entire paragraphs here serve to do nothing but fill empty pages. It is like someone ate away all the luscious cream from my chocolate truffle gateau, leaving only the plain sponge behind, mocking me with the erasure.In a word, it is bland, tasteless, almost unmemorable. The only time I caught a faint flicker of Rushdie was at the end of Chapter 9 where he attacked an extremely unpleasant aspect of Gandhi every Indian has either chosen to overlook or furiously deny and forget:”Like Gandhi performing his brahmacharya (celibacy) ‘experiments of truth’, when the wives of his friends lay with him at night to enable him to test the mastery of mind over limb, he (Solanka) preserved the outward form of high propriety; and so did she, so did she.”The narrative is extremely disinterested, even if the change in “trademark” Rushdie style is admitted – it just doesn’t connect with the reader. Unlike some of his other works, this has neither content, nor style. Solanka’s motivations, even towards the end, seem plain unbelievable. Eleanor’s sudden appearance, Neela’s sacrifice, everything, in fact, seem too dry and contrived. The only reason I did not lem this book was that I wanted to know if this ceaseless criticism on the book was justified, or if it was plain unacceptance of any methodological deviance from the signature Rushdie style.All I can say is that it was well-deserved, and I’m not going to waste my time dwelling on what already other reviewers have pointed out. Off to something better.
What do You think about Fury (2002)?
Glancing at the other reviews here that say this is one of Rushdie's worst books, I seem to be in the minority. I actually liked this, whereas the only other book I've read by Salman Rushdie – Midnight's Children – I pretty much hated. Fury tells the story of Malik Solanka, a successful dollmaker who stepped out on his family one night and left them behind in London as he went to escape his inner demons in New York City. As Rushdie writes:"He had come to America as so many before him to receive
—Justin
The least enjoyable of the Rushdie books I've read so far. Unlike, say, The Satanic Verses, the narrative is straightforward, easy to follow and makes little use of fantastic or magical happenings -- but that only seems to make the stranger happenings of the story less believable. I liked the protagonist, Malik Solanka, but every other character, especially the two female leads, came off as a sloppy caricature without any real depth or inner life. Anything involving Mila Milo and her oh-so-amazing web startup was particularly painful to read. Rushdie slips slightly into that badly grating way of talking about Internet technology you hear in bad news reports: treating as wondrous novelty that which anyone more familiar with the domain has come to take for granted. Little things like putting a technical term everyone already knows in quotation marks as if it were new and needed special emphasis. Argh.I was also bothered by the fame-and-fortune wish-fulfilment of the story. Solanka's doll characters really aren't believable as a record-breaking consumer phenomenon. He's plainly not as brilliant as the book would like us to believe. And one can't help a bit of eye-rolling at the perky, punky 20-something and the traffic-stopping (literally) indo-american beauty queen both falling for the frumpy 50-something Rushdie-like protagonist.
—Entropic
The overwhelming feeling after reading this book is of an immense waste - of the reader's time, of the writer's undoubted talent and of the multitude of pages on which its printed, which could have been put to much better use. Right from the start, it seems like a pointless book. This feeling remains & intensifies throughout the book and at the end, is confirmed beyond doubt.The story is about a man in the grip of fury (the reason for which we aren't given until almost the end, and that reason, to me at least, is not convincing enough). Anyway, he has become a threat to those he loves and so just takes off to another continent (without so much as a goodbye to his wife and son), where he tries to undo his old self, hoping that whatever is wrong with him will be destroyed along with his old identity. The book chronicles his efforts to defeat his furies with the help of the people he encounters.So, not a wholly stupid plot. What makes it bad is the unbelievably bad writing. Sometimes its hard to believe this is the same guy who wrote 'The Moor's Last Sigh'. There is no continuing thread through the story. It frequently runs off on tangents and doesn't bother to rejoin the main theme. Rushdie's books usually need a lot of patience and I've become quite patient reading his books, waiting for the point to appear out of the fog of fancy words and tedious abstractions; but with this book it was a hopeless exercise because there is no point to it.Even more unforgivable than the bad writing is the fact that the story seems forced, somehow. As if the writer's publishers told him to come up with something quickly and he started writing about the first thing that came to his mind without bothering about plots, themes, coherence and all the other things that make a decent book, trusting his reputation to ensure it would be accepted, even acclaimed. And sadly, it worked. Reading the reviews, you'd think this was a masterpiece. When in actual fact, it could be the worst book Rushdie has ever written ('Shame' was depressing, but at least it was well-written). This is just an ego-trip of sorts, most evident by the resemblance of the protagonist to the author himself, and the tiring fact that rather than battling his furies, he seems to be spending too much time encountering stunningly beautiful women with all of whom he has his way.In the end I'm left salvaging what little good I can from this disaster of a book. The only thing I come up with is this line - 'Do not contemplate what lies beyond failure while you are still trying to succeed!'Not so much a bad book, as an unnecessary one!
—Kailash
