miniature birds chittering in your ears

I think I'd honestly rate different parts of this book differently, if that would make any sense. It takes a while to explain enough to get things going, and wanders off in the weeds toward the end a bit (in my view). There's some good stuff in here, but the book as a whole didn't function as a complete machine for me. There was a lot I liked, but I've liked other things Rushdie has done more.

Fury by Salman Rushdie, Finished Reading on 30-March-2009

By selecting Fury as my first review, I think I just have done the unthinkable. I dont know how I ended up with this book. I have got about 150 books in my shelf which I have not read yet. May be some unknown force wanted me to start my blog with a classic review of this well-known book. It took me total eight days to complete this two fifty six page book. Considering my normal hundred and sixty page perday speed, its really a long time.

Jacket cover synopsis:
"Malik Solanka, historian of ideas and dollmaker extraordinaire, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family without a word of explanation, and flees London for New York. There's fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he loves. He arrives in New York at a time of unprecedented plenty, in the highest hour of America's wealth and power, seeking to 'erase' himself. Eat me, America, he prays, and give me some peace.But fury is all around him."


After reading the first few pages of fury, I thought the pages might have shuffled or there might be some printing mistake. Initially I was just rushing along the pages to find some meaning to all the incoherent chapters. Finally after a lot of rereading, and brooding, I got the glimpses of the story line. May be I am not intellectually evolved completely to digest all the information in one shot or may be author purposefully wanted to put a opaque frame infront of the readers to keep up interest. Frankly saying, it took a great deal of time for me to understand the story thread. May be it is because of the lenghty paragraphs which does not seperate conversations into a seperate paragraphs. Despite of the initial boredom and dragging end, story does seem to be interesting in the middle.


While going though the ramblings of Solanka's mind, it suddenly stuck me that may be sometimes I do ramble like this. From that moment onwards, I liked this novel. It is just an earnest representation of a man's fury. While reading this novel, I came across lot of paragraphs which I consider one of the best-written paragraphs ever. Story, with such scope for high emotional quotient, is realy handled well by the empathatic narration. Other than the commendable writing, the story as such did not make any impact on me. It reminded me of a Malayalan novel 'Gasakkinte ithihasam' which I read long back. I felt the same emotions are portrayed here also even thought the story is different. Author never says whether protogonist overcomes his fury in the end of the story. It is upto the readers to decide. I particularly like the quote in the last pages of the novel. 'Something is pushing them...To the side of their own lives'.


As a whole I would not rate this book more than 2.5 out of 5 and the mostly points goes to the narration style which irritated me to death in the starting. If reader is looking for a mood-lifting Bridget jones kind of reading, I will not recommond this book at all. Its apt for a reader who is in a retrospection mood. It may help you to stir up the emotions while reader reaches the final chapters.


Rating 2.5/5

Everything I've heard about this one is terrible. That being said, I got it for $3.95 in first-edition hardback at a Flying J's of all places. I guess those truckers like to get their late Rushdie on while they're gassing up?

Quite shallow. There’s definitely no understanding of what anger is. Forget fury.

Someday I'll read a Salman Rushdie book that makes me understand why he is considered a great writer, but this is not that book.

I seem, lately, to be drawn toward the novelization of train wrecks. First Rebecca, and now this, which may not have been the best Salman Rushdie novel to start with. It requires knowing whether Rushdie is a genius or a hack.

If he’s a genius, this is an amazingly furious attack on the intellectual class, those who believe that government can order the sun not to rise. The main character, Professor Malik Solanka, is a furious intellectual insecure that other people might know more than he does. And who can’t control his outbursts. He came very close to deliberately murdering his wife and child, and so runs away to America.

Throughout the book, Rushdie keeps dropping hints about hallucinations, about wish-fulfillment fantasies. Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris is the most heavy-handed allusion, but there is also Peter Pan and even the Lost Boys of vampire fame. Arthur Clarke’s Nine Billion Names of God is one of the main character’s favorite stories.

This book was published in 1999, and predicts the left’s obsessions following the 2000 election. The main character is a madman ranting about the evils of America. He is filled with hate, and hypocrisy, and fearful that others will do to him what he does to those around him, and hopeful that all the world shares his sins so as to make them virtues.

Often, those crimes he in his insanity ascribes to others metaphorically, he himself is actually committing, up to murder. So he thinks, at least, and I’m not sure he was wrong, despite the tidy and unbelievable wrap-up toward the end.

This is an astonishing portrait of a philosopher, a social justice warrior, who believes he has all the answers and is furious that no one will listen. And when one person, his neighbor, does listen to his litany of oppressions, he discovers that his neighbor's father was blown up in Serbia. It is Solanka’s worst fear: even his oppressions are lesser oppressions.

Several chapters later, we discover that he has even worse horrors hidden in his past. Solaris has given him the past he wants most.

Then he takes up with a woman as entitled as he is, who will defame anyone once they disagree with her politically, who demands both sides of the road while decrying those who want rules for roads as evil. She’s just left his best friend, who he abandons—his only real friend—to turmoil and doubt. And, as often happens with the left’s failed icons Jack becomes his brave friend again only after his death, when he can no longer contradict.

The story Solanka chooses to believe is that his friend was a sexual predator, an out-of-control black man. Anything to assuage the Solanka’s conscience for his own sins of possession and murder.

Solanka is his own Solaris, rewriting his past to give his present more power, trivializing true victims, telling us that all you need to overcome the aftermath of horror, such as child abuse, is a pat on the head, a taste of the hair of the dog that bit you.

By the end of the story he has retreated fully into his fantasy world. The three AM confrontation with the three furies of relationships past has to be a hallucination. It makes no sense otherwise. And it leads into a world of masks, of the Occupy Movement (again, Rushdie predicts the future form of the left) gone south wearing the masks that Solanka created in his image.

The ending is pure dreamwalking. This could be a Philip K. Dick novel, and I’d know it was brilliant, and not have to think it might be a hack writer seduced by his own furious Solaris, and granting his main character the hot young women he wants to have.

القراءة لسلمان رشدي تضعك في إشكالية مستمرة منذ القدم , وهي حدود الإبداع و حرية التعبير , هل أخطاء مبدع (أيًا كان حجمها أو زمنها ) تجبرك على مقاطعة هذا المبدع وأعماله , أم أنك لابد أن تنتصر للحرية حتى مع من تختلف معهم !

أنا قرأت (أطفال منتصف الليل) وكانت أفضل عمل قرأته في 2014 على الإطلاق , ولم أتردد في اقتناء أعمال أخرى للكاتب ,لأني أحببت أسلوبه , أما تهمته الكبرى (آيات شيطانية ) فلم يسعفني حظي بعذ في اقتناءها والاطلاع عليها , فهو برئ إلى أن يثبت العكس .

المهم : نحن أمام عمل يناقش الأزمة الإنسانية التي يتعرض لها المثقف , أزمة الصراع مع نفسه ومع بيئته المحيطة ومع حتى نظام حكمه , فهي أزمة نفسية سياسية مجتمعية , ولطالما وقع فيها الكثيرون , من النخب إلى عامة الشعب , ولطالما اختلف في علاجها البشر , منهم من يفضل المواجهة (وتكون مدى الحياة) ومنهم من يفضل المثالية في التعامل والصبر على الإصلاح , ومنهم من يختار البُعد والعزلة التامة ليقيم حياته و تصرفاته و ردود فعله المختلفة .

نحن هنا أمام عمل يتناول الشريحة الأخيرة وهى من اختارت العزلة , يتناول سيرة مثقف اختار طريق الوحدة لعلاج نفسه من المشاكل المحيطة به , كل ذلك مع عرض مميز لذكرياته الكثيفة يستعرض من خلالها حياته المليئة بالأحداث .

عن العصر الحديث بصخبه وعنفه والهشاشة التي انتابت مواطنيه في مختلف العالم , لينتج لنا مجتمعات ممسوخة تعاني من ازدواجية عفنة تضغط على المواطنين باستمرار ليكونوا في النهاية معدومي الهوية الحقيقية , و يعانون من انصام بشع بيم مُثل يسعون إليها وواقع زائف مضطرين للتعامل معه .

عن شخص رأى في لحظة تجلي استحالة الحياة بشكلها المعتاد فترك أسرته (زوجته وابن وحيد كانوا أكثر من عشقهم) وترك بيئه التي توغل فيها وصنع اسم محترم له , ترك كل ذلك وآثر الوحدة التامة ليضع نهاية لحياته لا بالانتحار بل بقطع كل الصلات عن عالمه القديم.

العمل نفسي بامتياز , يتناول تفاصيل النفس الانسانية ببساطة وعمق في آن واحد , ليعرض لنا أكثر من وجهة نظر لنفس الشخص بسلاسة ممتعة .

ترجمة العمل معيبة للغاية , العمل به شئ ناقص , هذا ليس أسلوب الكاتب (من خلال تجرتي الأولى له) الترجمة جامدة لا حياة فيها , وإن نجحت في أن توصل هدف الكاتب وغايته في النهاية .

في المجمل عمل جيد.

"Hayat öfkedir, diye düşündü Solanka. Cinsel, ödipal, siyasi, büyülü, hayvanca öfke bizi en yüksek doruklarımıza çıkarır ve en bayağı derinliklerimize indirir. Yaratıcılık, esin, özgünlük, tutku gibi, şiddet, acı, saf korkusuz yıkım, vurduğumuz ve yediğimiz, acısı asla geçmeyen darbeler de öfkeden kaynaklanır. (...) Aslında olduğumuz şey, maskelemek için kendimizi medenileştirmeye çalıştığımız şey budur: İçimizdeki korkunç insansı hayvan, kâinatın yüce, üstün, özkıyım eğilimli, azade efendisi. Birbirimizi büyük mutlulukların doruklarına taşırız. Paramparça ederiz." Bu alıntılar kitabı olduğu kadar yaşadığımız dünyayı da özetliyor aslında. Malik Solanka'yla birlikte edebiyat, sinema, müzik ve siyaset göndermeli öfkeli bir yolculuğa çıkıyoruz. Bay Rushdie

"Life is fury. Fury-sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal-drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. 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. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from bloody limb."
Malik Solanka, historian of ideas and dollmaker extraordinaire, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family without a word of explanation, and flees London for New York. There's a fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he loves.

And boy, ain't that fury furious. Solanka, who has a good job, a successful invention, and a loving family, one day finds that he's about to do something out of fury, without realizing he's about to do it. He hightails it to America to get away from this furious act, and America makes him furious, too. Its consumerism, commercialism, fakeness all make him furious.

This book, I've inferred, is set in 2000 in New York (we know it's New York; I'm guessing it's 2000), and one thing I love about Salman Rushdie is how he uses pop culture references as metaphors and implicit setting: Bush/Gore, Springsteen, Barbie dolls, Ricki Lake/Jerry Springer, Elian Gonzalez, etc., etc., etc. For the most part, he doesn't *say* "The Springsteen concert just happened here in New York where he's touring for such-and-such album, therefore I'm hinting it's the year 2000"; and even when he *does* say things like mentioning that a billboard advertises Ellen DeGeneres' upcoming appearance (which could be fact-checked and is a very real world thing, not an I'm-reading-a-fiction-book-which-means-these-events-are-made-up), it's along with the hypocrisy of someone publicly wanting to go through a "private" life choice. The references not only set the timeframe of the novel, they also push that fury-at-American-consumerism-and-commercialism-and-fakeness one more level. And that's all in addition to the plot of "How's this guy going to get rid of his anger? Is he always going to be furious? And who's the behatted murderer?"

The final storyline (as in the last, or maybe the next-to-last, storyline introduced, and the one the book ends on) made the book lose a little greatness in my head. It felt superfluous and unnecessary, and drew away from the meat of the book. (It was another storyline of fury, though.)

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!

For the first half or so of this book, I was so engrossed in and excited by this novel. The social commentary on race, gender and class as well as the satire of academia and American culture was pointed and complex, and the prose was peppered with quotable ruminations on American culture and human nature itself as well as clever literary allusions and parallels. The book is at its best when it focuses on an immersive psychological portrait of a deeply disturbed and alienated former professor and doll-maker named Malik Solanka, who, due to unnamed trauma, has fled his former life in the UK to start fresh in America and is continually possessed with an uncontrollable fury. His rants about American materialism, capitalism and superficiality are poignant and true, but also take a disturbing turn when the invective becomes directed at three wealthy young white women who were brutally murdered--whether or not by Solanka himself is for the reader to find out.

In the final third or so of the book, however, all of the psychological, literary and satirical richness of the beginning gives way to a hackneyed romance and several unrealistic plot turns that stretch the reader's suspension of disbelief. Worse yet, many of the thematic concerns introduced early on in the novel--the protagonist's tendency to flee obligation, his blind spots about women, his judgementalness, and most of all his titular problem with fury--get thrown by the way-side and are not satisfactorily resolved. What started as a deeply thought-provoking and compelling literary work I would have re-read and recommended many times over became a silly mess in the end. So many elements, including a romantic subplot, pages spent on a sci-fi world that wasn't altogether relevant, an absurd misadventure to a country torn by civil war, an unrealistic deux ex machina involving all three of the protagonist's love interests could have been cut in favor of character development and the searing satire and complex themes originally introduced. Looking back, it felt as if Rushdie was trying to do too many things at once in one novel, making his treatment of certain issues feel rushed or contrived.

I don't know that a book has ever excited me this much only to let me down so incredibly in the end. This is the first book by Salman Rushdie that I have read, and it looks like others of his were award-winning and perhaps more cohesive and well-written. I want to give those books a chance because this one had so much potential.