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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliantly Unleashes the Greek Furies on Modern America, July 14, 2006
Furious. The word means extremely angry or violent, but it can also mean anything involving violence, anger, or speed (such as "Fists of Fury" and the absurd "The Fast and the Furious"). Its roots reach back to Greek mythology, to the three snake-haired, bat-winged, and dog-faced goddesses Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megaera. These three horrible deities were the vengeful hands of the gods, punishing evil and wrongdoing, especially within families.
In FURY, Salman Rushdie uses every variation on these definitions, and the etymology of the word itself, to describe with modern life in America (as represented by New York City) and the fragility of family, relationships, and perhaps even sanity. Rushdie sarcasm cuts sharp and deep. His New York (no, his America) is an empty land, a moral vacuum filled with sensationalism, tawdriness, superficiality, materialism in the extreme, capitalism run rampant, self-serving and incompetent politicians the endless striving for publicity without sense of shame, culture without depth, and, like a drug addiction (note that both his heroes studiously avoid medicines and drugs of any kind), a continuous search for the constantly escalating "fix" that gives the citizenry their latest cheap thrill or sense of meaning. "The whole world was burning on a shorter fuse. There was a knife twisting in every gut, a scourge for every back." Rushdie also conceives three female Furies of his own (Solanka's wife Eleanor Masters, his cyberpunk neighbor and father-figure seeking Mila Milo, and the enchantingly beautiful Neela), and they indeed each exact their form of vengeance on the main character and sinner, Professor Malik Solanka.
Professor Solanka gives up his esteemed seat in philosophy at King's College, University of Cambridge, to develop a television program about the great philosophers using dolls as the main characters. The host/narrator/interviewer, a blonde female doll named Little Brain, travels through time to interview Spinoza, Galileo, and others. Against all odds, the show is highly successful, and Little Brain even more so. The doll takes on a marketing life of her own, becoming one of the world's best-selling toys even as she bears no residual connection whatsoever to philosophy. Wildly financially successful, Solanka is nevertheless unfulfilled. He finds himself prone to sudden, almost inexplicable rages, and they grow in strength until he finds himself one night standing over his wife's bed with a carving knife in his hands. To save his wife and young son from himself, he leaves them without explanation and heads for New York City, the land of continual regeneration and rebirth.
Solanka's appearance alone in New York sets the stage for all manner of adventures, most of which generate satire filled with cynicism about the people, politics, and culture of America. Everyone falls within his sniper's sights - Giuliani and Police Commissioner Safir are glove-puppets, Bush vs. Gore becomes Gush vs. Bore, Ellen DeGeneris delivers her "deeply so-so material" and exclaims to her adoring throng of screaming women, "Praise me, thank you, thank you, praise me some more, hey, look, Anne [Heche], we're an icon! wow!, it's so humbling..." Rushdie mines the current events and culture deeply - Elian Gonzalez, Amadou Diallo, Marc Antony and Marky Mark, El Duque, Halle, Tyra, Kate, Brad, Gwynnie, Meg , Julia, Tom, Jenny, Puffy, Mick, Christie Brinkley, Woody Allen, Donatella Versace, Charlton Heston ("Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children were getting shot?") - just to throw their inanity back in our face. And it works. "Everyone was an American now, or at least Americanized...Even anti-Americanism was Americanism in disguise, conceding, as it did, that America was the only game in town..." Literary allusions abound as well, from Kafka to Jackie Susann, from Joseph Conrad to Stanislaw Lem. Set within Rushdie's telescopic rifle sight, Maya Angelou becomes "the model for millions of young people...O, her dauntlessness in the face of poverty and cruelty! O, her joy when Fate chose her to be one of its Elect!"
Rushdie's story line wanders through the landscape of modern America. A string of gruesome serial murders (which Professor Solanka believes he may even have committed in his blinding, black-out rages) invades the upper crust of New York's young female socialites as 19- and 20-year olds Lauren Klein (a marriage of Ralph and Calvin?), Belinda Booken Candell, and Saskia "Sky" Schuyler die horribly, linked to a thrill-seeking sadomasochistic sex club. Rushdie draws particularly on the role of the Internet in creating further avenues of estrangement and escapism via a host of alternate realities. As ever, these virtual realities take on their own "real life," become marketed as products (Solanka strikes it rich a second time by inventing another set of "virtual dolls" whose story-line and characters actually inspire and invoke a revolution in a South Asian island named Lilliput-Blefuscu, drawn from the warring islands in Gulliver's Travels but modeled loosely on East Timor). Not only does America promote the confusion of real and make-believe, it exports those products around the world for good or bad.
At times chilling, at times hilarious, and at times fantastical and even slapstick (everywhere that Neela went, pratfalls among her male admirers were sure to go), FURY is an outlandish tale of post-millennial, globally networked, American-inspired life. Furious with its own ebullient energy, this story creates and explodes its own myths (Little Brain, Akasz Kronos, creator of the Puppet Kings of Baburia) and then explodes their superficiality in disturbing counterpoint to the depth and meaningfulness of the ancient Greek myths. A manic, hyperventilated, crazy quilt novel this may be, but as ever, Salman Rushdie's scalpel cuts sharply to expose the absurdities and tragedies of modern life. FURY is a joy to read and savor.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Despair, January 19, 2002
Most critics have described the latest novel of Salman Rushdie as a failure. Very simply, they are right. The contrast with Rushdie's three eighties novels are striking. Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses were not only amazingly inventive and ingenious, they were also both deeply moving and very cutting politically. Midnight's Children included a horrifying description of Pakistan's unspeakable brutality against Bangladesh in 1971 as well as the thuggishness of Indira Gandhi's State of Emergency. Shame, of course, was a damning portrait of Pakistani politics, caught between a vicious military and clerical elite and a demagogic populist pseudo-socialism. The Satanic Verses, in turn, was a brilliant attack on British racism and insularity, Islamic fundamentalism and Hindu communalism. And throughout all these books there was the alternative of a secular and leftist politics. After writing The Satanic Verses, of course, Rushdie was forced to spend his life in hiding from the death threat issued by the Iranian government. Although Rushdie has gradually been allowed to be seen more and more in public, he has been isolated from his native India and Pakistan, and from much of the plebian vitality that infused his novel. At the same time Pakistan and Indian politics have become even more hopeless. The possibility of either secularism or a leftism or even a politics seems increasingly remote. The consequences of this on his fiction are clear. The New York that depressed academic and millionaire Malik Solanka arrives is the gaudy world of celebrity and power, the city as viewed by the writer on hiding on brief vacation. It is not the communities of Jewish, "working-class Catholic," black or Hispanic communities. It is not a city with a society or a history or a politics. The result, not surprisingly, is that his portrait of American consumerism is trite, uninventive, unmemorable, predictable. There are other problems. At times, we are told, Solanka is filled with rage, with venom. Indeed, the reason the 55 year old academic suddenly came to New York was because one night he found himself holding a knife over his sleeping wife. But we get no description of his rage, compared to Celine, or even Mordecai Richeler's Barney's Version, they are the mildest of reproofs. The linguistic inventiveness seems to have almost completely dissipated. There are still the long sentences, and the string of details, but there is no real force or passion behind them. There is nothing here like the throw-away paragraph on the Aliens Show that Rushdie wrote in the Satanic Verses. During the novel Solanka conducts three love affairs, one with his younger wife, the other two with stunningly beautiful women young enough to be his daughters. Given that Rushdie is Solanka's age and has recently left his own wife, one might consider this an unpleasant self-indulgent fantasy. There is in fact good reason to think so, and the fact that the relationships fail do not remove the bad taste from the reader's mouth. Nor does the incest motif which also complicates one relationship succeed either, since it is almost impossible to write about the sexual abuse of children without appearing meretricious. (Yet this does lead to one of the book's few memorable images: "He [Malik] could barely speak to her [his mother] without provoking a howl of guilty grief. This alienated Malik. He needed a mother, not a waterworks utility like the one on the Monopoly board.") Solanka has made his fortune, twice, because he has produced a series of dolls which have for reason we need not go into become wildly popular. Yet even here Rushdie's interest is slack. A related subplot about Fijian politics, on an island named Lilliput-Blefuscu in honor of Jonathan Swift, also seems weak and underdeveloped. (There is one good pun about eating eggs, though). So why, may one legitimately ask, does this book get three stars, and not two or one? The answer is that although Rushdie's portrait is probably unconscious, and although the work is infused with an aesthetic illness that may well prove terminal, something of value is being described. The title is misleading, since what is lacking is fury, passion, a sense of injustice and indignation. (Again, one should note the contrast with Swift.) Solanka himself is not motivated by rage, but by its absence. Indeed, he increasingly lives in a society where such sentiments are inconceivable. If the New York of Fury is a world without politics or history or society, then that is partially because that is the way its rulers wish it, as democracy moves from the consent of the governed to finding ingenious ways of ensuring their acquiesence. If the hero of the Satanic Verses could redeem himself by civic duty and love for his dying father, that is increasingly not an option in today's world. Sheer greed and selfishness masquerade as Anti-Utopian principle, while invoking Orwell is a substitute for intelligence and moral courage. In such a world great sex is always possible for the rich, even for rich 55 year old Indian academics, but love and hope are truly utopian, (and ergo, truly evil in the world of Peretzspeak). In such a society, Solanka's self-pity, his solipsism, his brittle personality is all too realistic. And more like V.S. Naipaul than either author would like to admit.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Response to Peter Wild--i think you've missed the pt., November 15, 2004
I dont think Peter Wild has a fundamental enough grasp of Rushdie's work to be called into the "spotlight review" by Amazon though he is a person and entitled to an opinion. The fact is this is *not* the same type of work Rushdie has done in the past--it is not nearly so grand or as "magical"--so I dont think you should be putting it on that same level of comparison. This is an entirely different animal.
"Fury" is an impressive work nonetheless. Rushdie has long been known by himself and others as a "metropolitan intellectual" and his primary concern is with this interaction b/w city environs and the individual and how one's personal identity can be transformed, shifted, literally "translated" from one continent to the next. This is no different. Rushdie's characters have always relied on this premise of *metamorphosis* and building an alchemist's substance into the character as he progresses from one state to the next. This is a fascinating process and it continues to be one of the major aspiring reasons why his work continues to be read.
I don't think it's fair to accuse Rushdie of being some secondhand Roth rip-off. Philip Roth, as much as Salman Rushdie, deals with personal identity issues and the conflicts that ensue against the forces that try to shut them up. In this regard, I actually consider them very much the same in drawing up this process of *self-identity*. It's important, and people want to know this. Rushdie and Roth are both in the same company when it comes to affirming an individual against oppressionist forces, be they conservative Jews or fundamentalist Muslims.
But back to the work, "Fury" is an interesting work, not really for its departure from his previous more grander novels, but for its brevity and realism. The fact that Rushdie uses a larger part of the novel to depict a time, a cultural ethos, a *place*, much as James Joyce or Charles Dickens do, should not come as a shock, or at least not as an unpleasurable one. Rushdie is entitled, as much as any other author of his age, to depict the "realism" of a modern New York and I say he does so in ravishing good taste. The whole point of the fantastical element--the toy figures and fetishizations with dolls-- are, ok, silly at times, if wholly unbelievable, but *that's* the element which allows the imagination its license to work on the reality. Rushdie is not trying to make it all realistic, he's only setting a background out of which surrealistic events and craziness may possibly abound--such is his view that not all of modern life is "real." A lot of it actually is "unreal" and it's this "unreality" that reveals the greater truth about modern living--it just blows your mind sometimes.
Rushdie writes in the tradition of Jorge Borges, or Kafka: the imagination is how you reveal a deeper truth, a quality "more everlasting" than could be conveyed by conventional space and time. Vonnegut was the same. You have to allow Rushdie this license to create surrealism out of the real, or else you've missed the pt. entirely.
"Fury" should be read, not because it's important or pleasurable (though it is often) or because it's from a celeb writer, but for its three/four/five-dimensionality. It is a book that will bend the bounds of conventional thought if you allow it. Just think about the symbology or the characterizations more closely and you might possibly see the collision of two simultaneous worlds--one of the immensely poor and the fancifully rich, the ghetto and the high-class, the carnal sexual desires with a safe, secure marriage-- you will *see* how this conflict arises into fury. You will *see* how this torn-ness can result in escape or a "rip" in the fabric of normalcy. It's important to see how this dynamic works.
I've enjoyed all of Rushdie's other works and I did enjoy this one as well. The fact that it is shorter should be an obvious sign that this is not the same type of story, it's not an epic. It is, however, an enthralling tale that will make the imagination soar. As usual.
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