- Audio Cassette
- Publisher: Recorded Books; Unabridged edition (September 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1402501765
- ISBN-13: 978-1402501760
- Product Dimensions: 15.9 x 10.4 x 6.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 254 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
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Product Description
From Amazon
Fury is a gloss on fin-de-siècle angst from the master of the quintuple entendre. Salman Rushdie hauls his hero, Malik Solanka, from Bombay to London to New York, and finally to a fictional Third World country, all in order to show off a preternatural ability to riff on anything from Bollywood musicals to revolutionary politics. Professor Solanka is propelled on this path by his strange love of dolls. He plays with them as a child; as an adult he quits his post at Cambridge in order to produce a TV show wherein an animated doll, Little Brain, meets the great thinkers of history. Little Brain becomes a smash hit, and perhaps inevitably, Solanka finds himself in America. (It's not only the show-biz version of manifest destiny that brings him to the New World: one night in London he finds himself standing over the sleeping figures of his beloved wife and child, frighteningly close to stabbing them. This intellectual puppeteer is, of course, fleeing himself.)
Now, in New York, he is filled with wrath. Solanka is far from being an Everyman, but his fury is a kind of Everyfury. It's road rage writ large--the natural reaction to an excess of mental traffic. There are several books running simultaneously here: a mystery, a family romance, a bitingly satirical portrait of millennial Manhattan, and a sci-fi revolutionary fantasy. A single fragment gives a sense of Rushdie's reflexive multiplicity: when Solanka finally faces his memories of childhood, he recalls "his damn Yoknapatawpha, his accursed Malgudi." Here's a writer who, leading us into the tender places of his protagonist's soul, stops long enough to reference not just Faulkner but Narayan as well. If it sounds like a bit of a mess, it is. If it sounds frighteningly intelligent, it's that too. --Claire Dederer
From Publishers Weekly
The sea change has invigorated Rushdie. His new novel is very much an American book, a bitingly satiric, often wildly farcical picture of American society in the first years of the 21st century. The twice transplanted protagonist (Bombay born, Cambridge educated, now Manhattan resident) Prof. Malik Solanka is an unimaginably wealthy man, transformed from a philosophy professor into a BBC-TV star, then into the inventor of a wildly popular doll called Little Brain. Compelled to relinquish control of the doll when it metamorphoses into an industry, the furious Solanka flees London for an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. His prose crackling with irony, Rushdie catches roiling undercurrents of incivility and inchoate anger: in cab drivers, moviegoers and sidewalk pedestrians; in ethnic antagonisms; in political confrontations; and in Solly himself, as he tries to surmount his guilt over having abandoned a loving wife and three-year-old son in England, and as he becomes involved with two new women. Rushdie's brilliantly observant portrait of "this money-mad burg" is mercilessly au courant, with references to George Gush and Al Bore, to Elian and Tony Soprano, and to "shawls made from the chin fluff of extinct mountain goats." The action is helter-skelter fast and refreshingly concise; this is a slender book for Rushdie, and his relatively narrow focus results in a crisper narrative; there are fewer puns and a deeper emotional involvement with his characters. Still, his tendency to go over the top leads to some incredulity for the reader; it's a bit much that short, unprepossessing Solly is a magnet for gorgeous, articulate women, who all tend to speak in the same didactic monologues. On the whole, however, readers will nod in acknowledgement of Rushdie's recognition that "the whole world was burning on a shorter fuse." Rushdie remains a master of satire that rings true with unsettling acuity and dark, comedic brilliance. Agent, Andrew Wylie. 8-city author tour. (Sept. 11)Forecast: Rushdie has never been so sharply observant of the American psyche and the contemporary scene, and thus so relevant to U.S. readers. His increasing visibility after the isolation of the fatwa years should create a buzz of interest in this novel.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Weak in the Middle (3.5 Stars),
By
This review is from: Fury: A Novel (Paperback)
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.
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Waste of Time & Attention,
By Charles B Baker (East Marion, NY United States) - See all my reviews This is the first novel of Rushdie I have read and, based on this experience, I'll never try another. The book leaves this reader completely disengaged. There is not a single human character in it; they are all "dolls", cardboard cutouts. Occasional clever or witty remarks and asides do not redeem it. Rushdie seems to collect book prizes like others do boxtops. I can only wonder why.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Salman Rushdie's Best Satirical Novel,
By
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