Fury

Trop foisonnant. Au final : assomant.

My first brush with Salman Rushdie proved to be, frankly, uneventful (perhaps like my experience with Coetzee’s “Disgrace”, sorta, kinda). He writes of this “fury, born of long injustice, beside which his own unpredictable temper was a thing of pathetic insignificance, the indulgence, perhaps, of a privileged individual with too much self-interest.” This is what happens when a man accumulates too much wealth having ideas which blow up to become global phenomenons—hopefully not an autobiographical theme for Rushdie. Why are writers with so much fame becoming so self-aware of it & exploit this to the fullest in their works? Guess I'm still enchanted with that (now-mythical) figure of the penniless artist. Coetzee, Rushdie, McEwan, Cunningham… they all write about the rich folk having feelings too.

Another thing: if you have not familiarized yourself with mythology well enough, this novel may become murky, blurry. Why are narrators so cranial nowadays? Not everything goes back to ancient Greece, that story of a lucky individual can never become globalized… that is too fake an anecdote, almost elitist; too unfortunate a plot to undertake with brilliant, neat prose. Plus hearing about the Zeitgeist from an older British gent, his take on post-millennium Americana, is not as riveting as, say, ANY GIVEN/TOKEN U.S. TEEN’s daily diary confessions.

My first Salman Rushdie book and I loved it. He has become one of my favorite authors.

This book is about a cambridge-educated professor who has a messed up childhood and becomes a creator of alternate worlds in his bid to live a better life. His creation becomes wildly popular and lucrative. But in its popularity, he loses control of his creation which combined with his earlier childhood experiences creates a seething fury within him. This latent fury betrays his external successes and echoes the US prosperity boom of the late 90's and its dormant rage due to people's disappointment in themselves for not being "successful" enough.

This book also shows the power of imagination in creating social realities and the loss of the creator's ideal perfection when his ideas are implemented, sometimes with disasterous consequences. Sometimes when life imitates art, the consequences are not as a great as the ideal. A real life parallel to this theme is communism. I wonder what Marx and Engels would think of their utopian idea of communism if they were alive to see his how it effected Stalinist USSR?

ألطف ما قرأته له حتي الآن
الترجمة العربية سيئة جدا، يمكن تكون اسوء ترجمة في التاريخ

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.

n  Why do I read Rushdie?n

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.

wow. just wow.

maestralan je. želim pročitati cijeli njegov opus.

Great writing, impossible to follow. Was so glad to be done.

Setting: New York (mainly).
Indian-born Malik Solanka flees his London home for New York, leaving his wife and son behind, after he finds himself standing over their sleeping bodies holding a carving knife - worried that his pent-up fury will lead him to an unconscionable action.
He arrives in New York to an American economy at the height of its wealth and power but where other countries' fury against America is deemed there to be envy. Malik also encounters fury at every turn - from his ex-wife, from taxi drivers and even from the serial killer murdering women with a lump of concrete. As Malik tries to cope with his new existence and resist the appeals of his young son to return home, he encounters two different women and feels strangely drawn to each of them - and has to deal with different types of fury....
This was quite an unusual read but strangely compelling. The descriptions of Malik's life in New York and his experiences there were intense and gripping, as were the flashback stories for several of the main characters. One of my most enjoyable Rushdie reads - 8/10.