Fury

Fury is my second foray into Rushdie....and what a delightful foray it was. In a scant novel, Rushdie has managed to convey a complete disdain for American Pop Culture; a writer-protagonist who lives for the backstory, while suppressing his own; a quasi-paranoia of the Furies of Greek Mythology fame (one of the original 'woman scorned' figures); and so much more.Malik Solanka, professor, husband, father, and creater of the icon figure of 'Little Brain', who shot from off-time BBC kiddie show to cult figure and pop phenomenon in no time, has taken his considerable wealth, his fear of bringing harm to his wife and child (after finding himself standing over them with a knife while they slept), and his restlessness and fled home for New York City. While immersing himself in 21st century over-indulgence, Solanka says goodbye to Little Brain, as he loses creative control over her development. Drowning his sorrows and fears in alcohol, Solanka fears that he is the elusive 'Concrete Killer' at large in New York, who has murdered three socialite girls. His blackouts becoming more frequent, his actions unaccounted for, Solanka seeks to alienate himself from the world and remain in as much isolation and anonymity as possible. But the fame of being Little Brain's creator follows him and brings him into a dangerous affair with Mila Milo, a fanatical admirer of Brain and Solanka himself. Bordering on obsession, Mila's interest in Solanka grows, as does his self-doubt, and his certainty that he has brought down an ancient wrath upon himself that will plague him for the rest of his life.Through his friend Jack, Solanka meets and is enamored of a woman beautiful enough to stop traffic, Neela....who comes to him in need of a confidante to reveal that she thinks Jack may have some tie to the Concrete Killer.Solanka is a fascinating protagonist, due to his loss of memories during his drinking binges; his supposed mid-life crisis; his meticulous attention to backstory detail (again, as he buries his own backstory in his subconscious) and his ever-growing 'fury' at the world around him. Though the novel takes some very 'soap opera-esque' twists and turns, in today's world, some of the best-selling authors around are those who create the quick gratification thrillers that offer exactly the same kind of plot twists. But Rushdie does it with style and plausability.Other reviews have stated that this is not a great Rushdie offering, but I disagree with the notion that being so 'Pop American' this is an excellent starting point to give Rushdie a try, as it is so accessible to anyone familiar with American culture. His writing style, wit, and use of irony are top-notch.

I've long enjoyed and admired the works of Salman Rushdie, but with reservations. The greatest frustration is his fondness for the flashback, which he uses and abuses in each and every book. At least half of his works (ie. Midnight's Children, Satanic Verses, Ground Beneath Her Feet) have the same structure: Start with dramatic event/situation, usually cataclysmic, spend first 2/3 of book in flashback to events leading up to said event, and last third detailing aftermath and resolution of the event. Another problem, pointed out by the person who recommended Fury to me, is the preponderance of humor inside to India and Pakistani politics and the South Asian diaspora. Fury is a brilliant example of Rushdie's powerful, elegant, and forthright writing without being mired in the flashback ping-pong, the insider baseball, and the over-the-top surrealism and allegory of his earlier work. It showcases his growing into a more mature, universal writer. He's purged the, well, furies of his AngloIndian past that haunt his earlier works and moved on to something more universal.Fury paints a poigent portrait of many things. It captures the mad, brash bustle of New York City at its grandest, its most omnipotent and incontrovertible in the heady days before the little pop and big bang of the dot-com bust and 9/11. It also skewers, masticates, digests and defecates America in its turn of the millenium Golden Age of plenty, revealing how the end of that era, such a seeming surprise, had its warnings in how we responded to our spiraling greatness with increasing pettiness.In its depiction of the era just past, in America as represented by NYC, as seen the foreign eyes, Fury is great to read accompanied by U2's "All that you can't leave behind" on the stereo. The book also portrays the human soul, its illogical longings and the frustrations that build up under the surface into a boiling, raging Fury far greater for their original source. In a culture fonder of wallowing in its problems than dealing with them, Fury is a timely call to arms...and to honesty.

"Fury" is the newest-to-date novel by Salman Rushdie, short, neat and compact, and yet incredibly rich in detail, and setup, populated by lovable characters, but at the same time deeply philosophical with enormously influential contents, more often than not disguised within the unsaid, the context you have to be familiar with, the subtext of the grand space in-between of the actually written lines. Like many other good novels, "Fury" is a treatise on humanity, disguised under the compelling storyline. The book does not consist of a single thesis the author wants to prove, as it is often the case with lesser authors, but instead much is left to our intellect, we are left alone to draw the final conclusion as we wish. What Rushdie does is pursues a set of philosophical inquiries, twists the reality, dumps the subject matter into various cultural pots of dye and solution, analyzing the issues at hand from as many perspectives as possible. Ever since homo sapiens started to meditate on the nature of the world, and the nature of the human being, it has been of utmost importance to determine what drives us to do what we do in our life, why are human actions so contradictory, or why do they seem to be such - what is the true nature of the human being. Philosophers claimed all attainable positions in this regard, and yet no definite answer has ever been posed. The point of philosophy lies in inquiry, in meditation over the profound concepts and forces, despite the fact that from the point of view of traditional physics, such deliberation is fruitless and unnecessary. Definite answers are of more use in everyday life, in business, are valued by people with the immanent nature of the merchant. Yet for all humanoids of culture, these questions and the quest for discovery constitutes the meaning of life. Rushdie theorizes on the human nature, and one by one, gives us his conclusions."Life is fury, he'd thought. 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, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise - the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation." p. 30-31I am enormously pleased to say that this grim view on the human behavioral motives coincides with my own. Although ultimately the good overcomes the evil, although either extremum is rarely achieved by the human race, it's the petty evil that rules the world, dominates our actions, whether unmasked, or hidden deep below many layers of civilization superimposed on us from the birth. All that is valuab

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.

.Does this Rushdie guy fancy himself as a re-incarnated Old Testament prophet or what? In >, he certainly gives the Summer of 2000 in New York City the old Sodom and Gomorrah treatment. <p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Some excerpts from << Fury >> show how close Rushdie came to forecasting the mid-summer madness of the first year of Millennia III.<p>On p.44 his observation " America, in the highest hour of its hybrid, omnivorous power" is compared to "the last days of Rome".<p>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".<p>The spookiest paragraph in the book is on p114.<p>"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".<p>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.<p>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. <p>In the book, we have Rushdie and his characters, considering the possibilities of open-ended, collaborative, cyberspace linked, story telling and game playing. <p>Perhaps the author should have put down his pen for 12 months in mid-2000, and