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Fury Hardcover – 30 Aug. 2001

by Salman Rushdie (Author)

3.9 131 ratings

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Fury is the story of a dollmaker whose dolls run wild, of living women turned into dolls and then broken, and of a revolt on the planet's far side led by an army of living dolls. Fury is a novel of an old, deep love gone wrong, of a second, twisted passion rooted in wrongness, and of a third, passionate love that just might turn out right. Fury is a novel of furious energy, a study of the workings of fury at the heart of human lives: the personal fury that poisons human relations, the psychotic fury that fuels murderers, the social fury born of our raised and disappointed hopes, the creative fury that sets free our greatest gifts, the political fury that starts revolutions and burns whole cities down. Fury is a novel of today, an utterly contemporary portrait of life at the beginning of the third millennium, life in New York during an apparently endless time of prosperity that is paradoxically also a time of barrenness in many people's lives, and also in the world-empire that America rules, although it barely knows where it is.

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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

About the Author

Salman Rushdie is the author of seven novels, one collection of short stories, and three works of non-fiction. In 1993 Midnight's Children was judged to be the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first twenty-five years.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Professor Malik Solanka, retired historian of ideas, irascible dollmaker, and since his recent fifty-fifth birthday celibate and solitary by his own (much criticized) choice, in his silvered years found himself living in a golden age. Outside his window a long, humid summer, the first hot season of the third millennium, baked and perspired. The city boiled with money. Rents and property values had never been higher, and in the garment industry it was widely held that fashion had never been so fashionable. New restaurants opened every hour. Stores, dealerships, galleries struggled to satisfy the skyrocketing demand for ever more recherché produce: limited-edition olive oils, three-hundred-dollar corkscrews, customized Humvees, the latest anti-virus software, escort services featuring contortionists and twins, video installations, outsider art, featherlight shawls made from the chin-fluff of extinct mountain goats. So many people were doing up their apartments that supplies of high-grade fixtures and fittings were at a premium. There were waiting lists for baths, doorknobs, imported hardwoods, antiqued fireplaces, bidets, marble slabs. In spite of the recent falls in the value of the Nasdaq index and the value of Amazon stock, the new technology had the city by the ears: the talk was still of start-ups, IPOs, interactivity, the un-imaginable future that had just begun to begin. The future was a casino, and everyone was gambling, and everyone expected to win.
On Professor Solanka's street, well-heeled white youths lounged in baggy garments on roseate stoops, stylishly simulating indigence while they waited for the billionairedom that would surely be along sometime soon. There was a tall, green-eyed young woman with steeply slanting Central European cheekbones who particularly caught his sexually abstinent but still roving eye. Her spiky strawberry-blonde hair stuck out clown-fashion from under a black D'Angelo Voodoo baseball cap, her lips were full and sardonic, and she giggled rudely behind a perfunctory palm as old-world, dandyish, cane-twirling little Solly Solanka in straw Panama hat and cream linen suit went by on his afternoon walk. Solly: the college identity he'd never cared for but had not entirely managed to lose.
"Hey, sir? Sir, excuse me?" The blonde was calling out to him, in imperious tones that insisted on a reply. Her satraps became watchful, like a Praetorian guard. She was breaking a rule of big-city life, breaking it brazenly, sure of her power, confident of her turf and posse, fearing nothing. This was just pretty-girl chutzpah; no big deal. Professor Solanka paused and turned to face the lounging goddess of the thresh-old, who proceeded, unnervingly, to interview him. "You walk a lot. I mean, five or six times a day, I see you walking someplace. I'm sitting here, I see you come, I see you go, but there's no dog, and it's not like you come back with lady friends or produce. Also, the hours are strange, it can't be that you're going to a job. So I'm asking myself, Why is he always out walking alone? There's a guy with a lump of concrete hitting women on the head across town, maybe you heard that, but if I thought you were a weirdo, I wouldn't be talking to you. And you have a British accent, which makes you interesting too, right. A few times there we even followed you, but you weren't going anywhere, just wandering, just covering ground. I got the impression you were looking for something, and it crossed my mind to ask you what that might be. Just being friendly, sir, just being neighbourly. You're kind of a mystery. To me you are, anyhow."
Sudden anger rose in him. " What I'm looking for," he barked, "is to be left in peace." His voice trembled with a rage far bigger than her intrusion merited, the rage which shocked him whenever it coursed through his nervous system, like a flood. Hearing his vehemence, the young woman recoiled, retreating into silence.

"Man," said the largest, most protective of the Praetorian guard, her lover, no doubt, and her peroxide-blond centurion, "for an apostle of peace you sure are filled up with war."
She reminded him of someone, but he couldn't remember whom, and the little failure of memory, the "senior moment", nagged at him infuriatingly. Luckily she wasn't there any more, no one was, when he re-turned from the Caribbean carnival damp-hatted and soaked through after being caught unprepared by a squall of hard, hot rain. Passing the Congregation Shearith Israel on Central Park West (a white whale of a building with a triangular pediment supported by four count 'em four massive Corinthian columns), Professor Solanka scurrying through the downpour remembered the newly bat-mitzvahed thirteen-year-old girl he'd glimpsed through the side door, waiting knife in hand for the ceremony of the blessing of the bread. No religion offers a ceremony of the Counting of the Blessings, mused Professor Solanka: you'd think the Anglicans, at least, would have come up with one of those. The girl's face glowed through the gathered gloom, its young round features utterly confident of achieving the highest expectations. Yes, a blessed time, if you cared to use words like "blessed"; which Solanka, a sceptic, did not.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Jonathan Cape Ltd; First Edition (30 Aug. 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0224061593
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0224061599

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3.9 131 ratings

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Salman Rushdie
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Sir Salman Rushdie is the author of many novels including Grimus, Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury and Shalimar the Clown. He has also published works of non-fiction including The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz and, as co-editor, The Vintage Book of Short Stories.
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Saira Shah
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David Chapman
Rewarding
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 January 2013
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Hard work to begin with - but worth it!
A slight departure from what I usually read, but thoroughly enjoyed it!

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G. C. Brown
A master of the storytelling art
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 September 2009
Perhaps the greatest modern writer serves up a flourish of literary prowess and snobbery all injected with the usual lucid expression of the keenly observed. Oddly uninspiring, this woven interaction of the puppetry of magical realism with the realities of our existence provides a fable with no particular moral from a master of the storytelling craft. In other words it's hard not to admire his skill, but not a book I would strongly recommend. Not his best.

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Brian C.
Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 December 2015
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Exceptional read

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Akaash Rishi
Needs criticism
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 June 2021
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Who is this man? Where has he come from? Why is he treated as everyone else? Where did his pretty wife go and was he responsible for Frieda Pinto's fashion shoot? All this and more needs to be answered before I study one of his books out of chronological order after he has bared all on YouTube and risked a geek's exterior for what he accomplished with 1 literary critical book of his own.

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hampshire
One Star
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 December 2015
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No - tried again with Salman Rushdie - still can't get on with his work.

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J C Mitchinson
Fascinating and intelligent
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 September 2014
A disturbing and fascinating read, one that will stay with you for years.

I both disliked and identified with the main character, and found his motivations ambiguous, but not frustratingly so.

The language can be a bit dense, but if you persevere it is very rewarding.

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"hurburgh"
PORTENTS OR PRETENSE ?
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 November 2001
.
Does this Rushdie guy fancy himself as a re-incarnated Old Testament prophet or what? In << Fury >>, he certainly gives the Summer of 2000 in New York City the old Sodom and Gomorrah treatment.
To really get into this book it pays to have a dictionary of classical Greek mythology handy. All the references to residents of Olympus such as Kronos (aka Old Father Time with his scythe who does the deed on his daughter) and other sundry deities and demons may need a bit of explaining.
Similarly, Old Bill the Bard gets a fair workout as well. Rushdie lifts lines from Shakespeare's plays (often without attribution). I guess this is OK since Bill's been dead 400 years, and nobody reads him now anyway.
Rushdie uses the dramatic devices seen in << King Lear >>, where the madness of the principle protagonist, is mirrored by the chaos and storms in his surrounding physical world.
Rushdie, like his hero Malik Solanka has an obvious love-hate relationship with NYC and the USA. He is charmed and intoxicated by the vibrancy and creativity of the city and the culture it breeds, but at the same time is repelled by the decadent, transient vicariousness of it all.
Some excerpts from << Fury >> show how close Rushdie came to forecasting the mid-summer madness of the first year of Millennia III...
Rushdie's incorporation of mid-2000 contemporary events both as background and central scenes gives a strong immediacy to the novel. He even takes us to the South Pacific, where a thinly disguised Fiji and the coup it experienced last year becomes a pivotal event in the denouement of the story.
However, once our lead character escapes the realities and intensities of New York, the narrative descends rapidly into melodrama. After all the real-time buzz and credible scenes of the front end of the story, the cathartic nemeses we expect of a classical scholar like Rushdie, arrive far too predicably.
In the book, we have Rushdie and his characters, considering the possibilities of open-ended, collaborative, cyberspace linked, story telling and game playing.
Perhaps the author should have put down his pen for 12 months in mid-2000, and let the realities of 2001 complete the story for him.

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Soprano2099
My First Rushdie Novel!!!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 July 2007
A really enjoyable read!!! From the beginning Rushdie's narration is driven from the perpective of his protagnist Malik Solanka(a philosopher cum popular dollmaker) a character, who one can assume, is not unlike Rushdie (middle aged, tempremental and member of privilegded arty circles). The emphasis on Malik's perceptions gives Rushdie a platform to explore ideas that are seemingly specific to him but which are surprisingly universal. Plot wise it revolves around Malik fleeing to New York from London and his family. This escape is a result of a strange incident which has led him to believe he may possibly harm his family. In New York he is forced to make sense of himself and the world around him. This done by a his exploration of; the strange city he finds himself in; his roots in India; his marriages; his sexual daliances; his success as the creator of doll which has become a media sensation; his high soceity friends.

Due to the Fury's autobigraphical slant Rushdie indulges himself in a fair degree of -thinly veiled- self-aggrandisement. This is particularly evident in the media impact Malik's creation (a doll) has on mainstream culture. Also, Malik's other creations bizzarely become an integral part of coup on a politically tumultuous pacific island (think Fiji). However in spite of this, Fury is a good novel. In a lot of ways I found it similar to Saturday by Ian McEwan, not in regards to plot or even in terms of tone...however both Fury and Saturday seem to explore post-middle aged angst in a universal and human way.

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Amazon Customer
More Rushdie titles!
Reviewed in the United States on 27 February 2023
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I purchased so many Rushdie titles that I have not had time to read them all. This many really well written novels by a world-famous social commentator thrills my very soul. Winter will end and I will have to extend my reading projects into summer, but I know Salmon Rushdie's work will keep me occupied through "The Ides of March" and most of summer. Look for them at Amazon and catch-up on what has been happening in World literature.

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Karandeep Malik
Nice Fiction
Reviewed in India on 24 November 2018
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Salman Rushdie nov is about how every person has a Fury within and how it affects his/ her thoughts and where it leads to

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marie kiernan
Fury
Reviewed in France on 4 February 2014
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well when one likes Salman Rushdie one does
even when the read is difficult
I' ll take some more
thx

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Sudeshna Chakravarty
Four Stars
Reviewed in India on 2 February 2015
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All are quality products.
Thank you!

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mishanue
アメリカン！？
Reviewed in Japan on 20 August 2004
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おもしろかったです。
「怒り」に取り憑かれ、妻と幼い息子をロンドンに残してニューヨークに出奔した富裕な初老の男の魂の遍歴、、、の物語で、随所にラシュディらしい、時には滑稽とさえ思えるエピソードがちりばめられている。
　この作品でラシュディはなにより「アメリカ」、とりわけ大衆文化を描くことに力を注いでいる。現に彼はここ数年ニューヨークに住んでおり、ここで描かれている偏執狂的な、怒りに満ちた、アメリカの大衆社会の姿は、端的に"english man in NY"ならぬ"indo-english man in NY"である彼の心象を反映しているのだろう。固有名を多用した描写は豊かなイメージと鋭い洞察を示すことに成功してるといえる。
　ただ惜しむべきはあまりにインテリ向けの読み物であること。「去年マリエンバートで」のマッチのゲームを真似した、などのエピソードは殆どの読者にとっては意味不明だろう。
　それでも、読者をひきこんで引っ張っていく文章の力は健在。一読の価値はあります。　

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Fury Hardcover – 30 Aug. 2001

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