Would Rushdie's pyrotechnic prose ever disappoint? The tale was fantastical as ever but it feels as if the scale of events that usually transpire in a Rushdie novel was turned down a bit. Fury being one of my most favorite emotions, it was amazing to listen to Solenca explode in rage for the most part of the book. Rushdie's views on the American culture were gratifying to read as it aligns oh-so-well with my own opinions.

Salman Rushdie's 2001 novel Fury is a slim encapsulation of the zeitgeist of the turn of the millennium and surely some of the author's own feelings. As the novel opens at the beginning of the summer of 2000, the Bombay-born and Cambridge-educated Malik Solanka has abandoned his family and his London home for New York. After a fight with his wife, he had entered such a drunken rage that he nearly stabbed her and his child while they slept. Fleeing to this metropolis on the other side of the world, he hopes to calm himself and conquer the fury that has been building within him for years. But the title refers not only to a man's anger, but also to the avenging godesses that punish wrongdoers in Greek myth, and New York with its temptations offers plenty of opportunities for Solanka to call his own furies down on him.

FURY is Rushdie's most critically panned novel, but for most of its length I found it a worthwhile read. Its detailed depiction of the year 2000 struck a chord with me, pulling me back to this time of a booming economy, the emergence of the World Wide Web as a major social medium and economic driver, and various celebrity and political scandals. Few foreign authors have so absorbed urban American culture like Rushdie, presenting it authentically (which is already appalling enough) in its depth instead of a superficial stereotype full of misunderstandings. Rushdie's sense of the anger building not only within America but against it was powerfully vindicated after the events of 9/11. But it is interesting to read Fury today and reflect on the fact that America is no longer the indestructible superpower that it was when Rushdie penned the novel. The debacles of Afghanistan and Iraq and the rise of China have diminished the US's power, so there is not quite the same level of fear and hatred. The country's decaying infrastructure and growing unemployment have stripped away some of its appeal, thus there's no longer the same jealousy.

Had Rushdie ended Fury about 80% in, I would have rated this highly, but he goes on to introduce two plot twists that weaken the novel immensely. One is a major revelation about the main character's back story that was never foreshadowed and, once dropped like a bombshell into the action, is not taken up in any major way. The other is a shift of the action from New York to a South Pacific island nation rocked by ethnic conflict, a lightly fictionalized version of the troubles in Fiji that year. This last part of the novel is a return to the magical realism characteristic of Rushdie's earlier novels, and it is jarring after the more conventional fiction that preceded it.

I would recommend this novel only to Rushdie completists or to readers interested in fictional treatments of these heady times in American history (Rushdie explores some of the same concerns as DeLillo's Cosmopolis). I'm feeling very let down by how Rushdie drops the ball just when the reader is feeling a sense of nice closure with the plot, and I'm surprised it got past his editor.

Wow. And not in a good way. This is the first work by Salman Rushdie I have read and as I made my way through the book I found myself wondering why Rushdie’s writing has been so highly praised. Then I checked myself and tried to make sure that this wasn’t simply a case of me expecting too much. I don’t think it was. My problem was that it seemed as if some of the stories in the book were half finished. It also seemed as if the writer was trying to be clever. At times I found myself struggling to know what to take seriously, then I thought perhaps Rushdie was deliberately being ironic. But after a while I became fed up with trying to second guess the writer, and I began to lose interest. I kept looking for reasons other than hating putting a book away without finishing reading it, to continue. I couldn’t really find any - the characters were quite lifeless, therefore I wasn’t able to care about them.
There were times when some of themes in the book - artistic creation, love/hate, and materialism - threatened to make me think, but the threat was never fully carried out. Fury never really evolved from a social commentary on the start of a new millennuim to enough of a story for me.
I think the best thing about the book is the fact that the writer attempted to address big issues (see the themes I mentioned above), and also I found the way he put some of his sentences together to be very lyrical - he describes the onset of the digital age to be “the triumph of the numerate over the literate.” As a hip-hop fan I always appreciate words being put together in interesting ways.
I have a feeling that Salman Rushdie’s other books are much better than this, and that maybe I was just unlucky with my introduction to this writer. Fury has been on my to-read shelf since 2009, and I now know that all this time I wasn’t really missing out on anything.

I dont understand why it has garnered so many negative reviews. Once you plow past the initial few pages of languid storytelling and excessive emphasis on unimportant details, its a truly enthralling read. The narrative vacillates from borderline facetious to a melancholic antipode. Its a given that Rushdie novels are not natural page-turners and require patience and coaxing. But it has paid off for me every single time so far. Even the few instances of irrelevant verbosity is alleviated by the flowery language that leaves you spellbound nevertheless. Once you hit the stride its smooth sailing then on. The final fourth held me captive, completely oblivious to my surroundings. And despite the compelling story he weaves, the somber themes he explores, it somehow doesn't weigh on your mind much, which can sometimes be a good thing.

Λόγω του ότι έχω αυτό το χούι να αγοράζω βιβλία και ως αντικείμενα, ως συλλέκτης, συνήθως την πατάω και απογοητεύομαι.

Αυτό το βιβλίο το αγόρασα από ένα thrift shop κυρίως λόγω του ότι ήταν υπογεγραμμένο από τον Σαλμάν Ρούσντι τον ίδιο. Δηλαδή αυτό το βιβλίο το άγγιξε ο ίδιος ο Ρούσντι, περιέχει το DNA του.

Χωρίς να ήταν υπογεγραμμένο θα το προσπερνούσα απλά. Αλλά την πάτησα.


Χωρισμένο σε τρία μέρη αυτό το βιβλίο ξεκίνησε όμορφα (και τηλεφωνικό κατάλογο να έπαιρνα μετά απ' εκείνο το ανυπόφορο βιβλίο του Νταλί θα ήταν ενδιαφέρον), μου άρεσε που άκουγα ξανά την φωνή του Ρούσντι, γέλασα σε μερικά σημεία, και υπέθεσα ότι θα απολάμβανα αυτό το βιβλίο όπως έγινε και με το βιβλίο του Μπουκόφσκι αλλά δεν.
Το μομέντουμ που απέκτησε αυτό το βιβλίο εμφανίστηκε και χάθηκε στο πρώτο μέρος. Έτσι τα επόμενα δυο μέρη μου φάνηκαν χλιαρά, επαναλαμβανόμενα, με αχρείαστες λεπτομέρειες και βιογραφικά κομπάρσων (τυπική τεχνική του Ρούσντι) και βρέθηκα να το διαβάζω μόνο και μόνο για να τελειώσει.
Είχα αποφασίσει να του βάλω 2,6 να εμφανίζεται ως 3άστερο αλλά το γελοίο τέλος με ξενέρωσε μέχρι τον μυελό των οστών που το βάζω ένα καθαρό 2.

Πρωταγωνιστής της ιστορίας είναι ο Μάλικ Σολάνκα, ένας Βρετανός καθηγητής του Κέιμπριτζ ινδικής καταγωγής που ξαφνικά του την βάρεσε να παρατήσει την γυναίκα του και το τρίχρονο αγοράκι του και να πάει στην Αμερική να χαθεί, να τον ρουφήξει αυτή η Αμερική που απορροφά κουλτούρες, λαούς, έθιμα, να τον ρουφήξει και αυτόν και τον θυμό (ή παραφορά κατά τον ελληνικό τίτλο).

Ως έναν βαθμό τον καταλαβαίνω να είναι θυμωμένος με τη ζωή του να έχει τάσεις φυγής όπως εμένα, να θέλει να κάνει ένα διάλειμμα από γνωστούς και φίλους, αλλά - όπως εμένα- δεν διάβασε πρώτα τους στίχους του Καβάφη που λένε:

Καινούριους τόπους δεν θα βρεις, δεν θά βρεις άλλες θάλασσες.
Η πόλις θα σε ακολουθεί. Στους δρόμους θα γυρνάς
τους ίδιους. Και στες γειτονιές τες ίδιες θα γερνάς·
και μες στα ίδια σπίτια αυτά θ’ ασπρίζεις.
Πάντα στην πόλι αυτή θα φθάνεις. Για τα αλλού — μη ελπίζεις—
δεν έχει πλοίο για σε, δεν έχει οδό.

Έτσι όπως λέει και το ποίημα ο καθηγητής αυτός δεν μπόρεσε να ξεφύγει απ' το θυμό του, το πρόσφατο παρελθόν του, το μακρινό παρελθόν του (που όπως κάθε ινδικής καταγωγής χαρακτήρας του Ρούσντι, θέλει να ξεχάσει). Η πόλις τον ακολουθεί, τον κυνηγάει . . .

Αλλά όπως είπα η ιστορία έχασε το μομέντουμ (στο πρώτο μέρος) που είχε με την ωραία γραφή, την καυστικά αστεία κριτική πένα του Ρούσντι για την αμερικανική κοινωνία.
Έτσι το υπόλοιπο βιβλίο ήταν απλά μια επανάληψη που δυστυχώς δεν ήταν το ήμισυ της μαθήσεως.

This lacked the magic of the other Rushdies I've read. His work continues to annoy and amuse, alternately. The whole Gush/Bore thing I found smug, completely unfunny, and too obnoxiously pleased with its own cleverness. The same went with Asmaan's dialogue (i.e. "big stool" for school. Not funny or clever, really). I was surprised to think that Rushdie didn't have complete control over the child's voice, although I did like Malik and Asmaan's reunion at the end of the book. I also liked the line about where the car stops is where it is. I have no sense of direction, and understood the idea completely.

Anyway, none of the characters were especially lovable, it had all the anger of his other works, but not the fun (I don't care about the title of the book, I want some FUN, damn it).

Around 300 pages of what Cady Heron would succinctly refer to as "word vomit". I've always found Rushdie's treatment of women to be (in politically correct terms) problematic and (frankly speaking) chauvinistic.

Malik Solanka, our rather infuriating protagonist, is an academic-irresistably charming-brooding-creator of dolls and lives under the delusion that he's a master of the universe. Women pursue him despite his consistent urges to keep away from them, the public loves him, the media loves him! Oh everybody loves this delusional madcap of a terribly written character but Solanka is full of fury and the desire to murder people randomly because hello, he's an artist, women and family are terrible influences for the masculine artistic bravado, and life is a distraction to life itself.

If I read one more pretentious novel about men randomly abandoning women in the pretext of creative pursuit, I'll literally start a book burning club. TLDR; DONT READ THIS. ITS INFURIATING.

While this is the fifth book I "read" of the author, it is the first time I've tried an audio book medium with him. Read by the author himself in his somewhat hoarse voice, I had to go through the book twice, to get a reasonable comprehension of the book, due to a couple of reasons.


This is his first American novel. Written in 2000/2001, and published weeks before 9/11. It has many a reading of the American way of life, as well as some auto-biographical inferences of the author's own life at that point of time. The main character, Malik Solanka, a Cambridge man, a multi-millionaire in his second career, escapes to the U.S., leaving his wife and child in London. America brings Solanka its rich life, cult murders and its music - there is reference to Bruce Springsteen concerts and at least two tracks - 41 shots which was only a live version at the time the book was written ( it later appeared in "High Hopes" - 2014 ), and the much older, stellar, I'm on fire. Done with dolls, the success of which he cannot come to terms with, he starts off on a second career with cyber puppets - the new characters go off on a tangent of its own, and later the two coincide. Rushdie attempts to show that a masked reality, a copy of you, is possibly better at dealing with the American life in the year 2000. New York ! The City is boiled with money !

"limited-edition olive oils, three-hundred-dollar corkscrews, customized Humvees, the latest anti-virus software, escort services featuring contortionists and twins, video installations, outsider art, featherlight shawls made from the chin-fluff of extinct mountain goats."

As I found out from the previous work I read of him, a Rushdie novel is many layered work, with the fabric inter-woven. There are several stories running almost in parallel, a cultural reading, a cultural criticism and in this case, a virtual world of puppets which has more than a semblance of Solanka, and his friends - and foes. All this makes for a challenging read, and honestly not as rewarding as in the previous instances ( i.e. The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh and Midnight's Children ). One can't help but awe at Rushdie when one realises how updated he was back then. He was talking of replication, mirroring and spawning back in 2001 in web space. Yet, as a whole am not convinced that this novel came up a winner. Rushdie may have bitten off too much here for a single mouthful - a first American novel, I suspect. after a while the reader cannot help but wonder, why does he have to go to that length to stress the debacles of the new century, and money rich but ailing US. Plus, the book mayn't have received the critical attention it would've received, due to the soon to follow 09/11 incidents - a sobering effect if ever there was one. And Springsteen wrote a whole album of songs on "Rising" from the ashes.

As far as am aware there are at least two more Rushdie novels based on America - The Golden House ( which is likely to receive the audio book treatment from me ) and this year's Booker short listed ( fingers crossed ) Quichotte. I really do hope that Mr. Rushdie will be at least as good as he was in the books mentioned previously, in either of these two books. For now, I can only say, this book only deserves a patient audio book listen if you have some spare time.
( ***1/2)

there were several points in this book where i literally had to set the book down and think... really think... about the implications of the characters actions, language, conflicts. wonderful, but slow moving and very heavy.

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 the benison of being Ellis Islanded, of starting over. Give me a name, America, make of me a Buzz or Chip or Spike. Bathe me in amnesia and clothe me in your powerful unknowing. Enlist me in your J. Crew and hand me my mouse ears!"

Solanka is an angry, mostly unlikable man with a tortured past. As he makes his new way in America, his backstory slowly unfolds to reveal that he had tremendous success followed by bitter disappointment, with his invention of the doll Little Brain, that he's had two unhappy marriages and that he suffered abuse at the hands of his stepfather while a child in India. He's described as a rather unattractive man in his 50s, but yet he has a somewhat unbelievable ability to attract beautiful women. It's hard not to imagine that Rushdie wrote Solanka in his own image. As Solanka story unfolds, along the way there are murders of socialites and a coup in the fictional Lilliput-Blefuscu that ultimately comes to engulf Solanka and his lover Neela.

The story in and of itself was quite interesting, but what I liked best about Fury was its description of pre-9/11 America as seemingly wealthy and carefree, but with a weakness and fragility just beneath the surface. Rushdie effectively captured the late 90s/early 00s boom that was due to burst in so many ways just a few short years later.

"Might this new Rome actually be more provincial than its provinces; might these new Romans have forgotten what and how to value, or had they never known? Were all empires so undeserving, or was this one particularly crass? ... O Dream-America, was civilization's quest to end in obesity and trivia, at Roy Rogers and Planet Hollywood, in USA Today and on E!; or in million-dollar-game-show greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the eternal confessional booth of Ricki and Oprah and Jerry, whose guests murdered each other after the show ... Who paved Paradise and put up a parking lot? ... Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused him, and its vast potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction ... America was the world's playing field, its rule book, umpire, and ball."

Also prescient was Rushdie's circa-2000 description of the Internet and its life-changing promise:

"Everything existed at once. This was, Solanka realized, and exact mirror of the divine experience of time. Until the advent of hyperlinks, only God had been able to see simultaneously into past, present, and future alike; human beings were imprisoned in the calendar of their days. Now, however, such omniscience was available to all, at the merest click of the mouse."

With thought-provoking ruminations like these interspersed into an engaging plot, Fury was a very solid read.

Salman Rushdie, conocidísimo y polémico escritor indio, autor de Los versos satánicos (que tengo en mi lista de pendientes desde hace tiempo) nos presenta Furia, una novela que me decepcionó bastante, a pesar de tener algunos elementos rescatables y desarrollados con maestría.

En Furia, se nos presenta la vida del ex profesor de filosofía Malik Solanka, un total imbécil que ha huido de su familia y de todo lo que conocía en Londres para refugiarse en una Nueva York gris y fría. Hasta aquí, todo bien. Luego, el profesor se relaciona con muchas personas diferentes, sobre todo mujeres, que se sienten, de alguna manera, atraídas por él, y él, inevitablemente, es seducido por estas mujeres. Además, hay un asesino en serie que mata mujeres con un bloque de hormigón y les quita el cuero cabelludo. Y hay una chica vinculada a él (de una forma muy forzada) que curiosamente vive en el mismo edificio. Y hay un amigo suicida y una groupie literaria. Y un amigo negro con una belleza india. Y muchas cosas más que hicieron que al final no me gustara la novela tanto como lo auguraba su inicio.

Entre los elementos que me gustaron están las alusiones que se hacen sobre la cultura griega: las furias, las Euménides, que llegan a arrasar con todo. Esto es básicamente lo que le sucede a Malik: su cólera es tan grande que las furias se apoderan de él. Es una visión bastante bonita para describir el odio por todo, pero mi conclusión es que Malik pasaba por una crisis de cincuentón y se sentía desesperado, solo y muy enojado. Todo lo que le rodea lo decepcionó. Igualmente, el juego de las máscaras  Toda esa ridiculez de Cerebrito, los Reyes de la Marioneta, etc, etc, etc  me gustó mucho, porque, justamente, todo ser humano se esconde detrás de una máscara, detrás de algo con lo que puedes representar a otro y olvidarte de ti mismo. Malik no es la excepción.

Otro elemento que me gustó mucho es la crítica que se le hace a la sociedad consumista de USA. Sí, hay una visión de perfección en cuanto a ese país, pero no todo es realmente color de rosa. Sin embargo, y en contraposición a esto, Rushdie-Malik es un gran conocedor de la cultura pop, y de las supermodelos, y de los canales de chismes, etc. Eso me dejó desconcertada. ¿Criticas que las personas consumen basura pero tú también lo haces? Anyway.

La novela, a pesar de desarrollar sentimientos y emociones con gran precisión y sutileza (odio, amor, miedo, rabia, ira, ilusión, [des]esperanza), me parece olvidable. Sí, hay elementos memorables, pero ninguna historia de los diferentes personajes que se asocian con Malik me resultó creíble, nada terminó de encajar y lo del asesino en serie era una excusa  para matar a Jack, el amigo de Malik y que este se quedara con Neela, la mujer del amigo Hay una mezcla de situaciones muy extrañas y de verdad, no me lo creí.

Sin embargo, creo que algunos personajes como los de Neela, Tontón y Eleanor tienen mucha fuerza y carácter, porque se contraponen, en parte, a la estupidez e inseguridad de Malik. Sí, Malik me cayó pésimo, no tuve ninguna simpatía por él ni compasión al leer, al final, su historia. La disfruté, pero no es tampoco una gran novela.

"His wife's voice arrived in his ear via a cable on the Atlantic bed, or maybe in these days when everything was changing it was a satellite high above the ocean, he couldn't be sure. In these days when the age of pulse was giving way to the age of tone. When the epoch of the analogue (which was to say the richness of language, of analogy) was giving way to the digital era, the final victory of the numerate over the literate."

"Back in the seventies, working in ad-land had been slightly shameful. You confessed it to your friends with lowered voice and downcast eyes. Advertising was a confidence trick, a cheat, the notorious enemy of promise. It was--a horrible thought in that era--nakedly capitalist. Now everyone--eminent writers, great painters, architects, politicians--wanted to be in on the act. … Advertisements had become colossi, clambering like Kong up the walls of buildings. What was more, they were loved."

"If a doll had no back story, its market value was low. And as with dolls, so with human beings. This was what we brought with us on our journey across oceans, beyond frontiers, through life: our little storehouse of anecdote and what-happened-next, our private once-upon-a-time. We were our stories, and when we died, if we were very lucky, our immortality would be in another such tale."

"He, who had been so dubious about the coming of the brave new electronic world, was swept off his feet by the possibilities offered by the new technology, with its formal preference for lateral leaps and its relative uninterested in linear progression, a bias that had already bred in its users a greater interest in variety than in chronology. This freedom from the clock, from the tyranny of what happened next, was exhilarating, allowing him to develop his ideas in parallel, without worrying about sequence or step-by-step causation. Links were electronic now, not narrative. Everything existed at once. This was, Solanka realized, an exact mirror of the divine experience of time. Until the advent of hyperlinks, only God had been able to see simultaneously into past, present and future alike; human beings were imprisoned in the calendar of their days. Now, however, such omniscience was available to all, at the merest click of a mouse."