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.

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 His wife and 3-year-old son are back in London, and Solanka has ''withdrawn into himself'' -- as much as anyone can withdraw when surrounded by the cacophony of New York in the year 2000: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.

To be honest, ‘magical realism’ has always seemed too much a half-measure to contain what it wants to allege itself to be – an expansive suggestion of what might not be handled by realistic approaches alone. What happens to us daily may – with craft – take on symbolic weight, an importance at the haunted periphery. Mag-real blends the ostensible commonplace with a world of haunted memories and potentials.

There may be good reason to take the tack. In Salman Rushdie’s case, we have an entire Asian subcontinent barely known to the English and virtually unknown to Americans. In good faith, he relates ‘Indian consciousness’, what to the West is a large set of bewildering ideas and cultural rudiments. He does this as a Bombay Muslim man who himself schooled in Britain from his teens on – in highly cultivating institutions. He ‘translates’, human to human.

Perhaps to get a hold on what isn’t easily cognate, an author has to go far afield. Salman Rushdie employs the method that not a few in the past have also done successfully – go fanciful. Witness the absurd. Invent alternative vision. We’ve been warned long ago – Coleridge – to note the distinction between ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’. Literature is more willing now to overlap those categories.

It is a disservice to Rushdie that the review here doesn’t address two of his major works. Midnight’s Children, put him on the literary map. The Satanic Verses made him a target for religious assassins and drove him into protective custody for a decade. Both books deal with Muslim identity, Indian identity, the post-modern world. Their approach is ‘magical’, fantasy as a needed explanatory apparatus.

Fury takes place in New York City at the start of the new century. Its main character is Malik Solanka, an intellectual whose creation of dolls has had the luck – both good and bad – of finding commercial franchise and bringing him wealth but alienating him from what he created.

Something in him, however, breeds an anger that threatens to rage into violence. He has left his wife and child in England after feeling murderous impulse toward them. He finds himself in a NYC filled with great, sometimes brazenfaced wealth and power. The city has been experiencing grotesque murders, and witnesses have described someone like Solanka in the vicinity. The early anxiety of the book centers around that.

Rushdie’s more current book Joseph Anton, an absorbing memoir of his time under fatwa, deals with some of this same period in the author’s actual life. Basic biographical similarities do appear fictively in Fury (i.e. an estranged wife and young son, a new-found gorgeous lover, available wealth, creative life, U.S. location, Indian ethnicity and interests).

Characters that may read somewhat whimsical do have realistic edges, a craziness drawn from our known world and its near-extremes. This reads at first as a mystery, then a satire, then a comedy-romance, then an adventure, and ends on a note . . . surprising in its tragic implication. We might have been reading for this all along.

Whatever the reservations about fantasy one might have, undeniable is Salman Rushdie’s intelligence. His cultural absorption of American taste and his ear for American voice is superb. As a man ‘of the West’, he leaves nothing out. As a man ‘of the East’, he opens territory for America to explore.

In one further note, Rushdie’s essays collected in Step Across This Line prove his impeccable prose. The critical measure he exercises on matters literary, historical, political, would be hard to surpass. Exceptionally readable.

Giving this book three stars is not really fair. It is a very good, but it also could be much better. The problem here is not necessarily what the book does, it conveys itself very well, the problem is that the beginning of the book sets you up for a spectacular and philosophically challenging plot that Rushdie just can't pull off.

Sure the outward storyline flows smoothly and unpredicatably, bouncing the reader through neat unexpected events and witty commentary, but for all its quick cadence and New York (where it is set) cool, it starts to grow stale. Like your tenth fizz candy, or juicy fruit that has been chewed to long, it begins to become a little bland.

The main problem is that Rushdie seems content to constantly tell you what his characters are experiencing, tell you what is wrong with the society, tell you what is upside down and backwards yet upfront and expected about New York; instead he needs to dramatize these concepts and experiences and show his characters living them, allow us to come to understand how they feel instead of having them go on a page long tangent in their subconscious so that he can pontificate on American youth, or his internal fury. His characters don't actually seem as alive as they should, his very interesting insights don't catpure our attention as they could, his book doesn't hurt when it ends like we wish it would. Because, there is no attachment created, no bond between character and reader.

I have read a few of Rushdie's books since 'Midnights Children' blew my mind, and I have come to the conclusion that Rushdie is just a little too clever for his own good. It is too easy. His book dances, but by the end of this short novel your feet hurt and you are tired of spinning around and around in circles, you feel like you have seen something interesting but it is all a blur.

It took me three months to finish this novel. I am one of those people who likes to finish a book they start, so as you can imagine, it was almost three months of excruciating pain. I don't have anything to add to other people's negative review of this book, but there were many times during my attempt to read that I wondered what the point was. I was just too tired as I waded through the constant name dropping and pop culture references to give a crap about finding the hidden meaning, or metaphor. I've always been a big fan of Rushdie's writings, but this one got away from me.

Another Salman Rushdie creation, Fury, explores the inner demons - demons of an individual, demons of the society, demons in the city and the demons of humanity. The manifestations of ‘furies’ building within might be as simple as anger and addiction, to as complex as molestations and murders. Rushdie claims that these furies are the driving force which may torment some people and inspire others; but whichever be the form, their presence is undeniable, unarguable and universal.

“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! ... 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.”

Enveloped in this diverse range of furies, the most prominent being existential fury, is the novel’s protagonist Professor Malik Solanka. A man in his mid fifties, an academician of Indian descent living with his wife and a four year old son in London, eventually becomes the creator of ‘Little Brain’- a very popular mechanical doll that can philosophize. However, the pressures of fame become too hot to handle and he ends up moving to New York City, leaving behind his wife and four year old son without giving them any explanation.
Noone knew, but him, that one night he had found himself standing near his sleeping wife and son with a knife in his hands. He was unable to comprehend the rage and fire developing within and had then decided that it’s best for his loved ones to be as far from him as possible. He plans on fighting his inner demons someplace where atleast he can’t harm his family. Once he moves to New York, he gets entangled in the fury of the city and of the people there, clashing with his own turbulence.

Meanwhile, New York is under the grip of a Disney-obsessed serial killer whose victims comprise of rich, young and beautiful girls of the city; raped and scalped brutally. An alcoholic, disoriented Solanka wonders and fears if these murders are a result of the same rage that made him stand that night with a knife. To deal with this blame and wreckage, Solanka befriends a computer pro, entrepreneur and an incest victim, Mila, who claims to renovate people (mostly through blowjobs, though!).
Once with Solanka, Mila creates a new version of the Little Brain doll, which becomes a huge success. However Mila is soon dropped for a smart, politically aware, Indian beauty, Neela Mahendra who is a traffic stopper (literally), head turner, responsible for people walking into trees, dogs forgetting to pee and so on. Neela falls in love with Solanka and after much twists and turns eventually saves his life, risking her own. In the end, Solanka is seen watching his son play, wondering if his inner demons have been exorcised and if he can be reunited with his family.

As much as I tried, I could not ignore the autobiographical similarities in the narration and description of characters. Solanka giving up his post in Cambridge due to the ‘narrowness’ of academia is pretty similar to Rushdie’s reasons for leaving London. Solanka’s creation ‘Little Brain’ that could quote philosophy is on the lines of Rushdie’s creation - his books. The one ‘blasphemous’ work of Little Brain - which he then calls satanic doll - puts Solanka in great trouble, thus coinciding with Rushdie’s much controversial The Satanic Verses. Even the beautiful Neela falling in love with Solanka, a man twice her age, reminds the readers of Rushdie’s love interest Padma Lakshmi.

What I found missing in the book was that the description remains monotonously one-dimensional throughout and mostly devoid of emotion that couldn’t allow the readers to form a connection with the characters even till the end. I’m not too sure whether it is intentional or not, but until I have the likeability (or dislikeability) factor going, I wouldn’t care what the characters end up doing.

To me, I realized, Salman Rushdie has become so synonymous with magic realism that now when he narrates a contemporary tale, I find it tad annoying. What I loved about Rushdie’s previous works was the simple fact that the portrayals of events and people in his books are ordinary, yet creating an extraordinary satirical impact. It is done in such a way that the boundaries between reality and fantasy, tragedy and comedy, causes and consequences, become absolutely blurred. However, in Fury I could find none of this. Being master at manipulating words, many passages in the book were brilliant but that final zing, I felt, was just not there!

http://saimah-raza.blogspot.com/2012/...

The 3 stars are a very generous assessment of Fury. I was expecting to not like it, as I had read reviews, and Rushdie himself mention it as one of his worst reviewed books. And I didn't. This is continuous word vomit from page 1 to page 272.

There are threads of plot amidst all the verbal diarrhea posing as FURY. But, they don't come together, and to be honest, I have no idea what they needed to be there for. Let's see. The main character is a philosopher called Malik Solanka, who doesn't do well academically and decides to become a dollmaker. The doll becomes bigger than its creator and while Malik appreciates the royalties pouring in, he's still overcome with rage and ends up holding up a knife over his sleeping wife and son. This gives him the excuse he needs to abandon them without so much as a note, and to run off to New York. In New York, he has a weird (but sexy) neighbor Mila who enacts her daddy issues with him as a surrogate. He dumps her as well for an impossibly beautiful (and sexy) denizen of Lilliput-Blefescu (which in the context of this book is real, but they seem to be of normal size), called Neela, who he wins from a best friend. But the best friend may or may not be involved in a secret BDSM club whose rich-fuck members may or may not have killed and scalped their slaves. There is another plot involving a fictional sci-fi universe called [I can't remember already], where a doll maker makes living dolls who take over their universe and a coup d'etat in (real in the context of the book) Lilliput-Blefescu who use the symbols of the sci-fi universe. None of this makes any sense whatsoever except Rushdie maintains that we are meant to be seeing FURY in all of the character's situations.

Well, it's bad. But it still works in a way as a curiosity piece. In Fury, Rushdie writes, the Furies hovered over New York and America. He speaks of how everything is America centered, and even the anti -Americans center their envy and their rage on America. He has a character speak in a fit of road rage, you will be cleansed by the righteous fire of Islam! While this has nothing to do with the plot, it's certainly prophetic thematically, considering that Fury was scheduled to release in Sep 2001. There's also the fact that Rushdie makes the stylistic choice of inundating the book with pop culture references. This firmly puts the book down in pre-9/11 2001. While I would argue this might be a bad thing with other books, I think it works very well here. Fury tells the story of a New York with the twin towers still standing, but vulnerable to envy and rage nonetheless. This is the only reason the book is worth checking out.

Unfortunately, there's nothing in it to really recommend it as a story worth reading. Malik Solanka is a weak character to base a book on, and he's not at all sympathetic. His infidelities are brushed over, and his being painted as helpless in the face of a desirable woman is really creepy (especially since it sort of parallels where Rushdie himself was at the time of writing this). The plot dangles in several different places. There's a lot of noise, but not much worth listening to. The only (dubious) worth it has is as a keepsake from a seminal period of world history. 3 stars, grudgingly.

Disappointing. It feels condescending and self-aggrandizing at the same time. Very narrow, selfish perspective. Sad portrayal of female characters.

Moram se potrudit radi Ljilje(ako na kraju ona uopće ovo vidi i pročita)...
Prva bitna stavka je da je ovo definitivno knjiga od Salamana koju je zgodno pročitat prvu,s obzirom da je "težak" mislim da je dobar odabir bez obzira šta je nastala među zadnjima u njegovu opusu.
Tematika mi se strašno svidjela jer govori o modernom društvu i pojedincu u tom društvu koji se teško nosi sa svim tim. Dosta je autobiografije u njoj,tako da je stvarno fino kako se čovjek ne suzdržava da dijeli toliko svoje intime čitatelju. Jedina zamjerka,ako bi to spadalo u zamjerku je šta je malo više filozofski nastrojen pri pisanju pa na momente bude naporan. Sve u svemu čovjek je strašno inteligentan,tako da ima i pravo bit s vremena na vrijeme naporan,jer di da pokaže svoju superiornost nego dok piše, a opet mislim nije mi se pokazao egocentrikom pa ne znam sad da li da mu zamjerim to šta sam rastegla čitanje ;)

The book's first sentence sets the stage for what's to follow: "Professor Malik Solanka, retired historian of ideas, irascible dollmaker, and since his recent 55th birthday celibate and solitary by his own (much criticized) choice, in his silvered years found himself living in a golden age."

The next 260 pages serve to explain many of these words. Malik the irascible, easily driven to fury by the materialist soullessness that he sees in the golden age, encapsulated by New York City at the turn of the century. He's aging but still playing with dolls, creating alternate realities to escape from his past and the anger he attempts to keep caged within. He can't resist temptation, of being overwhelmed at the beginning of a relationship, but quickly fears of just being whelmed, and retreats back to his dolls until he can overcome the fury inside. Until, two women, in succession, help him overcome.

It's tough to summarize Rushdie, but that was my quick attempt. If you like Rushdie, you'll like this book, and I like Rushdie. I also like magical realism, but felt its use in Fury was a bit overwrought at times. I also like riffs and rants, especially about media-obsessed mile-a-minute escapist culture, but there are two sides to this coin. I'm also not sure whey he had to make Neela so ridiculously beautiful, stressed over and over again by men tripping over themselves and running into walls when she's around. I understand he's making a point about our beauty-obsessed culture, but I think it's more about Rushdie, I mean Malik, picturing himself with these women. Thus, I didn't "really" like it.

Some scathing, sardonic, sweet samples...

"There was a satisfying anonymity in the crowds, an absence of intrusion. Nobody here was interested in his mysteries. Everyone was here to lose themselves. Such was the unarticulated magic of the masses..." (p. 7)

"she was bright, lively, and like all of us believed herself to be an acceptable person, even, perhaps, a good one." (p.25)

"Solanka felt as if he had suddenly aged by 20 or 30 years; as if, divorced from the best work of his youthful enthusiasms, he at last stood face-to-face with ruthless Time. Waterford-Wadja had spoken of such a feeling at Addenbrooke's years ago. 'Life becomes very, I don't know, finite. You realize you don't have anything, you belong nowhere, you're just using things for a while. The inanimate world laughs at you: you'll be going soon, but it will be staying on. Not very profound, Solly, it's Pooh Bear philosophy, I know, but it rips you to pieces all the same.'" (p.103)

"... hill walking was what he liked to do to get rid of his people overdoses..." (p.113)

"There is that within us, he was being forced to concede, which is capricious and for which the language of explanation is inappropriate. We are made of shadow as well as light, of heat as well as dust. Naturalism, the philosophy of the visible, cannot capture us, for we exceed. We fear this in ourselves, our boundary-breaking, rule-disproving, shape-shifting, transgressive, trespassing shadow-self, the true ghost in our machine. Not in the afterlife, or in any improbably immortal sphere, but here on earth the spirit escapes the chains of what we know ourselves to be. It may rise in wrath, inflamed by its captivity, and lay reason's world to waste." (p.128)

"'You know how to generate love, Malik,' his wife told him. 'You just don't know what to do with it once it's there.'"

"The speed of contemporary life, thought Malik Solanka, outstripped the heart's ability to respond." (p.228)

"Violent action is unclear to most of those who get caught up in it. Experience is fragmentary; cause and effect, why and how, are torn apart. Only sequence exists. First this then that. And afterwards, for those who survive, a lifetime of trying to understand." (p.252)

Salman Rushdie's name has popped up in a number of books and articles I've recently read; always glowing with praise. So, I thought it was time I checked him out. What a disappointment. I really don't see the point to this book. Some Indian/English guy is having a meltdown, abandons his family and flees to New York where he engages in kinky sex and has psychotic episodes. With side stories about his wierd doll fixation, a character he invented named Little Brain, and a sci-fi world he creates. Very confusing and very dull.
He writes in that verbose English style that often includes obscure literary and historical references. Initially entertaining then maddeningly annoying. Oxford/Cambridge types showing off their education.
A good deal of time is spent bemoaning the current state of the world, circa late 1990/2000's. With particular venom directed at American global dominance, the shallowness of its citizenry, blah, blah blah. From our current vantage point that era seems pretty good, so Salman missed his mark. The novel appears to be a platform for Rushdie to pontificate on the triviality and banality of modern life. Why not write an opinion piece and save us from such a lame plot. A very tiresome book.

I read this book without knowing it was on the 1001 books to read that I do not know. It's a mixture of genres that brushes all situations through the demons of a man suddenly grappling with an outburst of madness. Even though there are good times, whether erotic or humorous, the whole thing is very confusing.