Customer Reviews

Fury: A Novel

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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.

I disliked the book intensely and feel cheated of the time it took me to decipher it.
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.

This is the same satirical Salman Rushdie I've read recently in his novel "Shame", replete with satirical, yet profound, comments on American culture in the months and days prior to September 11, 2001. Yet unlike "Shane", this elegant little book is purged of the former's memoiresque asides, and hence is a tighter, more gripping read. Admittedly "Fury" is the Salman Rushdie novel that is truly a roman a clef, with the hero and his girlfriend thinly fictionalized versions of Rushdie and his current love (I'm sure Rushdie's ex-wife, a noted American writer of fiction, isn't amused by her fictional counterpart.). Rushdie strongly criticizes the most virulent hedonistic aspects of American culture without sounding like an angry preacher; indeed, I couldn't help but laugh every time Rushdie's superb prose rendered sarcastic observations on prominent American politicans and media figures. I must confess that this novel isn't as well written or as captivating as Rushdie's "The Ground Beneath Her Feet", yet it does deserve recognition as one of his best works. Salman Rushdie is still at the height of his literary powers.

Look at the reviews and the ratings for this book and you'll notice something instantly - a host of 5 star reviews, and a host of 1-2 star reviews - with the effect that the book currently has an average rating of 3 stars. Seem strange? This is more than your usual mixed bag of reactions, and there's a reason for it.

First of all, Salman Rushdie is without a doubt one of the most skilful and intelligent authors currently writing in the English language. He has justly received much praise and many awards - notably being awarded the "Booker of Bookers" for his novel "Midnight's Children." His prose writing has an easy flair and wit that many would-be novellists in creative writing courses are feverishly trying to learn to emulate. In this book, he pulls out all the stops and lets go with his characteristic style. Hence the five-star ratings.

Unfortunately, Rushdie himself knows all this too well. In fact, it is possible his ego has become rather over-inflated from all his success. This is, in fact, what diminishes one's enjoyment of this book. Set in New York, the protagonist is too unashamedly an alter-ego for the author himself, who views everything with a quick, occasionally cynical, and very witty eye, describes his settings in gritty, fabulous detail, and manages to snag the most attractive women in the world without so much as breaking out in a sweat. While initially thrilling, this unbridled egotism can be a quick turn-off, however, as Rushdie the author puns without restraint, makes classical references and then points them out to us, and tries to astound and baffle us with his erudition. This misguided attempt to show how much more intelligent he is than his readers backfires in the end (for many of us).

If you have not read Rushdie before, I would suggest turning first to "Midnight's Children", which is a marvellous book and much less self-indulgent than this one. If you don't like Rushdie's other books - do not pick this one up, you'll be upset. However, for Rushdie fans who enjoy his style in general, this will definitely please, and you will probably find the ending especially quite brilliant.

I've long enjoyed and admired the works of Salman Rushdie, but with reservations. The greatest frustration is his fondness for the flashback, which he uses and abuses in each and every book. At least half of his works (ie. Midnight's Children, Satanic Verses, Ground Beneath Her Feet) have the same structure: Start with dramatic event/situation, usually cataclysmic, spend first 2/3 of book in flashback to events leading up to said event, and last third detailing aftermath and resolution of the event.

Another problem, pointed out by the person who recommended Fury to me, is the preponderance of humor inside to India and Pakistani politics and the South Asian diaspora.

Fury is a brilliant example of Rushdie's powerful, elegant, and forthright writing without being mired in the flashback ping-pong, the insider baseball, and the over-the-top surrealism and allegory of his earlier work. It showcases his growing into a more mature, universal writer. He's purged the, well, furies of his AngloIndian past that haunt his earlier works and moved on to something more universal.

Fury paints a poigent portrait of many things. It captures the mad, brash bustle of New York City at its grandest, its most omnipotent and incontrovertible in the heady days before the little pop and big bang of the dot-com bust and 9/11. It also skewers, masticates, digests and defecates America in its turn of the millenium Golden Age of plenty, revealing how the end of that era, such a seeming surprise, had its warnings in how we responded to our spiraling greatness with increasing pettiness.

In its depiction of the era just past, in America as represented by NYC, as seen the foreign eyes, Fury is great to read accompanied by U2's "All that you can't leave behind" on the stereo.

The book also portrays the human soul, its illogical longings and the frustrations that build up under the surface into a boiling, raging Fury far greater for their original source. In a culture fonder of wallowing in its problems than dealing with them, Fury is a timely call to arms...and to honesty.

Imagine a beautiful novel that masterfully blends a genre within a genre, such as Michael Chabon's Kavalier & Klay, in which a magnificent work of literature is set against the backdrop of the world of comic book writing, with story and sub-story feeding seemlessly into each other. Now imagine an utter failure of an attempt at this structure, and you have Salman Rushdie's Fury, a flawed and misguided mix of literature, fantasy, and science fiction. Rushdie's latest novel, while filled with the magical prose that he is known for, too often reads like an unpolished rough draft. Malik Solanka, the main character, is a man consumed by fury who escapes his wife and child in London because he is overcome by fear that he will kill them. He finds himself in New York, a city itself filled with fury and extraordinary wealth, and attempts to reconcile his wild thoughts and emotions in a world that at times seems out of control. Through his love affairs, his venture into the world of science fiction, and his tangential contact with a series of murders, we venture deep into the soul of a man tortured by the darkest sides of human nature.

Sound interesting? It might be, if it were well written. The book's themes are important and powerful, but their presentation is seriously flawed. Rushdie's tendency to prioritize style over substance and structure leaves this novel with an unfinished feeling. The book wanders aimlessly at times, and unfortunately lost this reader's interest long before the suspense-less climax. While Rushdie is rightly considered one of the master practitioners of English prose, this is far from his finest work.

"Fury" is the newest-to-date novel by Salman Rushdie, short, neat and compact, and yet incredibly rich in detail, and setup, populated by lovable characters, but at the same time deeply philosophical with enormously influential contents, more often than not disguised within the unsaid, the context you have to be familiar with, the subtext of the grand space in-between of the actually written lines.

Like many other good novels, "Fury" is a treatise on humanity, disguised under the compelling storyline. The book does not consist of a single thesis the author wants to prove, as it is often the case with lesser authors, but instead much is left to our intellect, we are left alone to draw the final conclusion as we wish. What Rushdie does is pursues a set of philosophical inquiries, twists the reality, dumps the subject matter into various cultural pots of dye and solution, analyzing the issues at hand from as many perspectives as possible. Ever since homo sapiens started to meditate on the nature of the world, and the nature of the human being, it has been of utmost importance to determine what drives us to do what we do in our life, why are human actions so contradictory, or why do they seem to be such - what is the true nature of the human being. Philosophers claimed all attainable positions in this regard, and yet no definite answer has ever been posed. The point of philosophy lies in inquiry, in meditation over the profound concepts and forces, despite the fact that from the point of view of traditional physics, such deliberation is fruitless and unnecessary. Definite answers are of more use in everyday life, in business, are valued by people with the immanent nature of the merchant. Yet for all humanoids of culture, these questions and the quest for discovery constitutes the meaning of life. Rushdie theorizes on the human nature, and one by one, gives us his conclusions.

"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! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. 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." p. 30-31

I am enormously pleased to say that this grim view on the human behavioral motives coincides with my own. Although ultimately the good overcomes the evil, although either extremum is rarely achieved by the human race, it's the petty evil that rules the world, dominates our actions, whether unmasked, or hidden deep below many layers of civilization superimposed on us from the birth. All that is valuable in this world is created in passion, propagated by the destructive fire of creation, the fury, the powerful furia of the human spirit. What else is love but fury? In modern times, we civilized peoples learned to stifle the fury, mitigate the burning brain, chain the wild personality. Is that it? Is it all we needed to do - to devise the instrumenta of self-bondage - to put out the furious fire of creation forever? The answer, obviously, is no. All troubles in this world, and all good things in this world as well, for that matter, stem from the fact that the powerful human spirit the destructive god of creation within us - is unbeatable, indestructible, when all is said and done. All kinds of deviations that pollute the civilization are the children of the stifled fury, when the pressure is too high to be sustained and controlled any longer. As a human race, we continue to create and innovate, because the individualistic fury of each creative human being refuses to align itself to the chain of civilization.

Rushdie brilliantly elaborates on this subject, in a delightful series of philosophical inquiries, where the answer is that of a chant, coming to the reader in spasms, in waves of understanding, and all that served within a delicious mixture of prose, philosophy, ethics, and the powerful commentary on the modern age. For you have to know that "Fury" is a multidimensional novel, which is by no means limited to the heavyweight meditations. The fact is, "Fury" is thoroughly enjoyable, the characters and the events are bound to stay with the amused reader for a long time. This novel is pure entertainment. The author seems to be in the strict minority of writers who are still able to use irony and sarcasm as a literary medium. I hail you, Salman. Last but not least, Rushdie's newest novel is best proof that for him as a writer, as a human being of culture, only the sky is the limit. I dare say Rushdie is more European than many of our writers back on the Continent. Rushdie is a Great Caveman, an honorary title assigned to all writers of intellect, courage, culture and cavemanly tradition. Allah Akbar, Salman - may your inspiration never leave you.

Rushdie's Midnight's Children is one of my favorite books of all time. Maybe that makes my disappointment with his recent works so much stronger. Where he has so effectively dealt with the theme of the Indian Diaspora (of which I am member), he has just as ineffectively rendered America. I think he just doesn't 'get' the US.

Aside from the uncompelling way in which he portrays America, the book fails to deliver on the "Fury" it promises. Actually, it never rises to more than mild irritation. Maybe "Annoyance" would be a more accurate title.

In addition, the "sci-fi" story the main character creates is laughable. And he has the nerve to dis "Star Wars"? As for the tie in to the 'real life' rebel insurrection? It's a poorly developed commentary on media impacting life. Where the magical powers of the characters in Midnight's Children contribute to the story, the "magic" of the puppets amounts to little more than a card trick.

If you want top form Rushdie, start with Midnight's Children or Grimus. Even reading his collection of essays "Imaginary Homelands" is time better spent.

What the hell happened to the writer of "Midnight's Children" and "Satanic Verses"? Both were life-changingly brilliant.
And now this drivel. Badly motivated, messy, carelessly structured, one-dimensional characters, cliched dialogue, turgid prose.
The plot turns on a dime for no rhyme or reason. The tedious sub-plots and ludicrous names ring false and forced. There were moments where I thought this novel was going somewhere, but alas, it sunk under its own pretensions. Rushdie's style somehow just seems best suited for the colorful, eclectic, surreal of India. Maybe his imagination fails him in America. I just hope there's some earthly reason, because I want him back. Please.

Something made Salman Rushdie, an author of prodigious talents, have to write this book, but you don't have to read it. Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" and "The Satanic Verses" soar with their larger than life characters, rich depictions of the Indian subcontinent, lyrical prose, and magic realism, and they tell fine stories. "Fury," by contrast, is a ruminating monologue, a screed, which wrestles darkly with American mass culture, the overclass, personas, the political pretensions of the Indian diaspora, intellectual honesty, and the dilemma of love.

There is narrative heat here but precious little light. Rushdie's characters fail to engage. His issues fail to resolve. A tragedy worthy of the Greek Furies, who horribly punish unavenged crimes, utterly fails to develop. Unless you happen to be writing your dissertation on Rushdie, you can safely pass on "Fury."