From Powells.com
In Greek and Roman mythology, Mother Earth had three daughters obsessed with seeking
justice for unavenged crimes. Usually portrayed as winged and serpent-haired,
the Furies hounded their victims until they either descended into madness or suffered
excruciating deaths. In Salman
Rushdie's aptly titled seventh novel, Malik Solanka muses on the Furies' role
in modern life: "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 at 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. We raise
each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from fucking limb."
As this passage suggests, Fury is an explosive, messy, choleric exploration
of the untamable extremes of human passion. As any reader familiar with Salman
Rushdie will expect, his eighth novel is also mischievously witty, linguistically
outrageous, and intellectually brilliant. Much like Rushdie himself, Malik,
a Bombay native living in London, has just left his wife and three-year-old
son and abruptly moved to New York. Disturbed by the violent emotions raging
within him, Malik hopes to find peace to be "erased"
by the metropolis. Instead, Malik is caught up in the city's passionate excesses:
cab drivers spout invective, billboards demand attention, a serial killer (whose
description is uncomfortably close to Malik's own) is murdering women with a
lump of cement, and Malik himself becomes deeply involved with a beautiful,
mesmerizing women. Fury marks a turning point in Rushdie's illustrious
career, a perfect match of author and subject. Finally the world's most famous
internationalist writer has written an ambitious, engaging novel about the world's
most cosmopolitan, and exciting, city. Farley, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
"Life is fury. Fury-sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal- drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. 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. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from bloody limb."
Malik Solanka, historian of ideas and dollmaker extraordinaire, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family without a word of explanation, and flees London for New York. There's a fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he loves. He arrives in New York at a time of unprecedented plenty, in the highest hour of America's wealth and power, seeking to "erase" himself. Eat me, America, he prays, and give me peace.
But fury is all around him. Cabdrivers spout invective. A serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete. The petty spats and bone-deep resentments of the metropolis engulf him. His own thoughts, emotions, and desires, meanwhile, are also running wild. A tall, green-eyed young blonde in a D'Angelo Voodoo baseball cap is in store for him. As is another woman, with whom he will fall in love and be drawn toward a different fury, whose roots lie on the far side of the world.
Fury is a work of explosive energy, at once a pitiless and pitch-black comedy, a profoundly disturbing inquiry into the darkest side of human nature, and a love story of mesmerizing force. It is also an astonishing portrait of New York. Not since the Bombay of Midnight's Children have a time and place been so intensely and accurately captured in a novel.
In his eighth novel, Salman Rushdie brilliantly entwines moments of anger and frenzy with those of humor, honesty, and intimacy. Fury is, above all, a masterly chronicle of the human condition.
Review
"The novel appears to be an apologia in part because it is nimbused by a dirty cloud of reality. Many readers will know that Rushdie himself has suffered an actual separation from an English wife and child, and has embarked on a new life in America, and has a beautiful Indian girlfriend whom he met at the launch party of Talk magazine. Quite apart from these meshings of subject and theme, the novel seems to want us to read it as a species of feverish diary. Fury might as well be time-stamped, and it might itself be entitled Talk: most of it is relentlessly set in the New York of last year, and records, as if offering the pages of a calendar, the city's large and small events." James Woods, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
Review
"A new novel by Rushdie makes news. The news about this one is that it is as good as the absolutely marvelous Moor's Last Sigh and even surpasses its immediate predecessor, the staggering Ground Beneath Her Feet." Booklist
Review
"Malik is a very fully realized character, and Fury positively vibrates with intellectual energy (it's also frequently quite funny). But it's still more tirade than novel: Rushdie's weakest book since his (justly) forgotten first novel (Grimus)." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Not only is the book smart, it also happens to be Rushdie's most entertaining. There's real comedy in Malik's rants....All very picaresque, all conspiring to make Fury something a Rushdie novel rarely qualifies as: a real page-turner." Paul Evans, Book magazine
Review
"The book is tediously, whimsically convoluted; an elaborate replay of the creator-creation question and of commerce's corruption of art." Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
Malik Solanka, historian of ideas and world-famous dollmaker, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family in London without a word of explanation, and flees for New York. There's a fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he loves. He arrives in New York at a time of unprecedented plenty, in the highest hour of America's wealth and power, seeking to "erase" himself. But fury is all around him.
Fury is a work of explosive energy, at once a pitiless and pitch-black comedy, a profoundly disturbing inquiry into the darkest side of human nature, and a love story of mesmerizing force. It is also an astonishing portrait of New York. Not since the Bombay of Midnight's Children have a time and place been so intensely and accurately captured in a novel.
About the Author
Salman Rushdie is the author of seven novels Grimus, Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the "Booker of Bookers"), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor's Last Sigh, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet and one work of short stories, East, West. He has also published four works of non-fiction: The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, and Mirrorwork.