Product Description

"Fury" is a wickedly brilliant and pitch-black comedy about a middle-aged professor who finds himself in New York City in the summer of 2000. Not since, the Bombay of "Midnight's Children" have a time and place been so intensely and accurately captured in a novel. "Fury" opens on a New York living at breakneck speed in an age of unprecedented decadence. Malik Solanka, a Cambridge-educated self-made millionaire originally from Bombay, arrives looking, perversely, for escape. This former philosophy professor is the inventor of the hugely popular doll, Little Brain, whose multiform ubiquity - as puppet, cartoon and masked woman - now rankles with him. He becomes frustratingly estranged from his own creation. At the same time, his marriage is disintegrating: it escalates into a rage-filled battle, and Solanka very nearly commits an unforgiveable act. Horrified by the fury within him, he flees home and family and becomes a sort of spiritual mendicant - except that he has a credit card and a duplex on the Upper West Side. Solanka discovers that he has come to a city roiling with anger, where cab drivers spout invective and a serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete, a metropolis whose population is united by petty spats and bone-deep resentment. His own thoughts, emotions and desires, meanwhile, are also running wild.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #122849 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Even before it published, Salman Rushdie's novel Fury was the subject of controversy. Holland's literary community was livid that a novel written by a non-Dutch writer was funded by their government. Rushdie watchers will spend column inches playing "spot the unmistakable biographical references": the main character Malik Solanka is a 55-year-old Indian professor; he later comes to live in England and flees to New York, leaving his wife and young son; in America, he falls for the beautiful Neela, clearly modelled on Rushdie's partner. However, tempting as it may be to focus on the circumstances of a book, rather than the text alone, ultimately it is the prose that must speak for itself.

The Fury of the title refers both to the mid-life rage of the protagonist, who finds himself standing over his sleeping wife and son armed with a kitchen knife, and the mythological furies who tore to pieces those men whom the gods had judged. As in his previous novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, he explores the relationship of the artist to his creation and to his audience. Solanka--Cambridge philosopher, doll-maker and possible serial killer--is the unlikely and unwilling creator of a pop-culture phenomenon that comes to represent everything he despises about modern cultural malaise. He is a part-creator of a culture he hardly understands--an anachronism. The novelist's prose reflects this alienation, but unfortunately with few insights or pleasures for the reader used to his contemporary mythological lyricism. Rushdie's pop references check-list the late 20th-century US from Clinton to OJ to the World Wide Web, and this, combined with their built-in obsolescence, renders Solanka/Rushdie's narrative strained. The urban culture of New York and Webspeak provide rich seams of traditional and new vocabularies and grammar for this most magpie-like of playful language lovers to line his literary nest with. However, in so doing, he cuts himself off from the emotional intensity and drive, combined with layered cultural complexity, that has distinguished his work, the most celebrated being Midnight's Children. Rushdie at his best is an intriguing writer; ultimately, it may be easier to extract him from the media circus that surrounds him than from the comparisons with his own compelling body of work. --Fiona Buckland

Review
'Both a howl of rage and a love letter...Rushdie is a very great novelist - our greatest' Guardian; 'He writes like an angel: an erudite, playful, imaginative, wildly intelligent angel' Ruth Padel, Financial Times

Boyd Tonkin, Independent
‘Thrilling writing…A simmering novel, as crammed with passion and potholes as a New York street’

Customer Reviews

It may not be his best, but still.........
As a huge Rushdie fan, I came to read Fury with high expectations, and I was not disappointed. Although the novel may lack what has become thought of as the 'traditional Rushdie style', in other words, a lively and compelling tale of relationships, contrasts between East and West and a wild array of exciting and inspiring characters, Fury should be appreciated for these differences and not blindly shunned at first glance.
Instead of becoming entwined with characters and their actions, in the novel we instead become enveloped in that most volatile of emotions, fury. The protagonist, Milak Solanka, is almost completely overtaken by his own fury and the novel deals, often in the most covert of ways, with his attempts to deal not with others and outside events, but with himself.
Compelling, undeniably interesting, almost too clever for its own good yet ultimately enjoyable, Fury is certainly one of the best books published in the last year. If it were by anyone other than the great Rushdie it would be heralded as a work of genius.
Give it a chance, throw away your preconceptions of what a Rushdie novel should be, and take Fury for the fantastic novel that it is.

A frankenstein's monster of a novel
For what is supposed to be a personal novel, "Fury" comes across as a book populated by authors other than Salman Rushdie. It just doesn't read like he's put any effort in at all, it is fast yet curiously devoid of any real emotion. Like a Frankenstein's monster whose stitches are coming apart, the book feels like a rag bag of different elements, none of which have a soul of their own

Lots of passages read like bad impersonations of great American writers. Rushdie is not Philip Roth so why try to borrow his bilious cynical style? He cannot get under the skin of New York so why try to be Paul Auster or Don Delillo? All the way through you wish for those writers to be writing this book, not Rushdie. This is a shame because he is normally such a mercurial writer. In "Fury" however he seems to top even Bret Easton Ellis for vapid contemporary references. What makes this even worse is the smug tone to it all. It seems to think that it is very clever when it sounds more like a man bragging in a bar.

For me, one particular passage sums up this messy novel. A back story about one of the characters (Eric [?] the jock boyfriend) is written in the pared down style of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. The story is very reminiscent of both writers and the characters surnames are Ford and Carver. I think you are supposed to think this is clever and ironic but it sounds like showing off.

Rushdie is so much better than this,so much so that "Fury" feels like a bit of a cheat. Maybe this book was a way of getting something off his chest before embarking on a major work. I hope so

Fury
This is the second Rushdie book I have read, and despite almost being put off the author by his self absorbed attitude, my faith has been renewed. Fury is an excellent book with some fantasic 'one liners' which really made you sit upright and think. His ability to stike a chord with the readers own life experience is amazing, even though the plot is far fetched, relevancy is still maintained. A great read - and I feel a slight sense of loss that closing the book waves goodbye to the main character.