A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
“Salman Rushdie’s great grasp of the human tragicomedy–its dimensions, its absurdities and horrors–has made him one of the most intelligent fiction writers in the English language.”
–Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe
“Fury is a profoundly, ecstatically affirmative work of fiction. It reaffirms Rushdie’s standing . . . at the very front rank of contemporary literary novelists.”
–Baltimore Sun
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. An astonishing work of explosive energy, Fury is by turns a pitiless and pitch-black comedy, a love story of mesmerizing force, and a disturbing inquiry into the darkest side of human nature.
“Rushdie’s ideas–about society, about culture, about politics–are embedded in his stories and in the interlocking momentum with which he tells them. . . . All of Rushdie’s synthesizing energy, the way he brings together ancient myth and old story, contemporary incident and archetypal emotion, transfigures reason into a waking dream.”
–Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Well, here it is, then, his first 3-D, full-volume American novel, finger-snapping, wildly stupefying, often slyly funny, red-blooded and red-toothed. [Fury] twinkles brightly in tragicomic passages.”
–The Miami Herald
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"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."
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble Review
Equipped with a virtual sixth sense of observation, a beyond-this-world command of language, and an uncanny ability to zero in on contemporary culture and chronicle all its frivolity and majesty, Salman Rushdie is among our greatest living writers. He is also one of our most prodigious.
Fury, his eighth novel, is a ferocious comedy that combines the writer's masterful storytelling with a commentary on 21st-century American society that packs a rabid pit bull's bite. It is, in a word, brilliant.
Fifty-five-year-old Malik Solanka is having a Dantesque midlife crisis. A former philosophy professor and creator of a popular doll known as "Little Brain," Malik is perched on a crag that overlooks an abyss of violence. He is very close to jumping in. Living in self-imposed exile in Manhattan during the summer of 2000, he has just left his second wife in London after finding himself consumed by thoughts of murder: "actual murder, not the metaphorical kind. He'd even brought a carving knife upstairs and stood for a terrible, dumb minute over the body of his sleeping wife." Like Orestes in the Greek tragedy cycle The Oresteia, Malik is being pursued by furies of his own making, riddled with a deep guilt that goes beyond his fleeting thoughts of bumping off his wife. As he traverses the infernal streets of New York in search of redemption and understanding, he is bombarded by streams of erratic and obscenely comedic stimuli -- cell phones, loud talkers, 24-hour coverage of Elián González, Rudy Giuliani, The Sopranos, designer clothes, fast food experiences that would lead a lab rat to commit suicide. For everyone else in New York, it's just an average day.
Fusing the transience of modern life with the philosophical truths of antiquity, Rushdie elevates American pop culture to the realm of myth -- but it is a myth as saccharine and diaphanous as cotton candy, a myth so capricious that no one can truly find comfort in its allegory. Caustic, intelligent, and sometimes "How the hell did he think of that?" hilarious, Fury is more than just our first great satire of the 21st century, it is a minor masterpiece. (Stephen Bloom)
Boyd Tonkin
...Fury contains enough thrillingly fresh writing and ideas to show up most of Rushdie's contemporaries as parochial plodders.... I wrote in The Independent's review of Fury that "I would rather read one page of flawed Rushdie than 1,000 of the soporific pap that often passes for 'literary fiction' in Britain today". Even at his worst, Rushdie will wake you up; even at their best, many of his politer peers will send you fast into a dreamless, idea-free sleep.
—The Independent (London)
From The Critics
Malik Solanka is pissed off. On the run in Manhattan from a dried-up career in English academe and ultimately from his boyhood in Bombay, the fifty-five-year-old former professor is maddened by a monstrous midlife crisis. It's not just the comb-over haircut and the midriff bulge; it's a shaking of the soul that both terrifies and entrances the hapless ex-don. As Salman Rushdie writes in his eighth and finest novel, "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 Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy."
Malik, Rushdie's most developed and engaging protagonist, is the dancer in this existential jig—and his challenge is to not be dashed to pieces in the process. It's a dicey proposition, given that what ails Malik is nothing less than modern life. Shaken one night when he finds himself, knife in hand, hovering over his sleeping wife and child, he flees his past: "[H]e wanted to lose himself because of a fear of what lay beneath, what might bubble up at any moment and lay waste to the undeserving world." Yet while he's mimicking the exit he'd witnessed as a child in India of an august banker who "abandoned his family forever, wearing nothing more than a Gandhian loincloth," Malik seems to be seeking not renunciation but oblivion.
He plunges into New York, a devouring consumer culture "of ever more recherche produce: limited-edition olive oils, three-hundred-dollar corkscrews, customized Humvees, the latest anti-virus software ... " Bankrolling him are theprofits from a bizarre enterprise: In years previous, thirsting for relief from academic aridity, he'd manufactured a meal ticket called Little Brain, a creature "first a doll, later a puppet, then an animated cartoon, and afterward an actress ... a talk-show host, gymnast, ballerina, or supermodel ... " His distaff Frankenstein's shtick is interviewing history's great minds on the BBC; she has become "the Maya Angelou of the doll world" or a Lara Croft with a genius IQ, as well as a rabid fan base. She's made Malik his fortune but underscored his greatest weakness, one that Malik's first wife long ago accused him of: "The world in inanimate miniature is just about all you can handle." The professor's mission, then, is to move from control and manipulation of a woman he made up to real love of a real woman in a large and messy world.
Fury flaunts all of Rushdie's intimidating gifts. There's the fascination with buzzwords, psychobabble and doublespeak from an intellectual who's expert in the language games of postmodern philosophy. There's the conflating of myth and pop culture that he mastered in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which recast Orpheus and Eurydice as rock superstars. The world's most notorious novelist ever since the Ayatollah Khomeini leveled his fatwa against him for writing The Satanic Verses, Rushdie here meditates provocatively on celebrity and alienation. The most recognized figure in postcolonialist fiction, he equates the world with multicultural chaos, which is exemplified by his own lifestyle (he has residencies in India and Pakistan, London and New York). Alternately a metaphysical thriller and a sci-fi-tinged fantasy, a treatise on gender politics and a farce about academia, the novel teems—as does its hero—with ideas.
Not only is the book smart, it also happens to be Rushdie's most entertaining. There's real comedy in Malik's rants, for instance. Whether decrying Internet obsessives or railing at CNN for broadcasting "all Elian, all the time," Malik can't keep his fury under wraps. (Sipping a latte at a pricey coffee bar, he gets booted from the place for screaming; he hadn't even realized he was "thinking" out loud.) Not since the endearingly misanthropic Ignatius Reilly of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces has outrage been rendered so hilariously; nor since Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities has urban paranoia been portrayed in such rich detail. And Malik has reason to be paranoid. Among Fury's myriad subplots is a tabloid-ripe murder mystery: Some psycho's been offing (and scalping) the city's "living dolls," the buff, brainy girlfriends of the Big Apple's creepy blue bloods. The media broadcast a composite of a suspect wearing a panama hat, and Malik, it turns out, sports exactly that headgear.
Meanwhile, another kind of death takes place. Just as Shiva destroys to create, Malik must endure the demise of his old self in order to live anew. And as with the Greek heroes, he must pass through trials. In Fury, these tasks are surreal, elaborate and tragicomic: He enacts a psychodrama with a street girl whose childhood hero was Little Brain; he delves into the netherworld of Internet gaming; he's drawn into conflicts in remote Third World locales. All very picaresque, all conspiring to make Fury something a Rushdie novel rarely qualifies as: a real page-turner. What linger after the entertainment are the questions the book raises about nature and artifice, coercion and acceptance, and the transforming value of fury itself.
—Paul Evans
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 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Rushdie's eighth novel, which was commissioned for a recent literary festival held in The Netherlands, is an intensely personal and surpassingly odd performance that bears only incidental resemblance to his recent successes (The Ground Beneath Her Feet). Protagonist Malik Solanka is a 50ish "retired historian of ideas" who's living in contemporary Manhattan, having left his American (second) wife and young son in London. Malik is wealthy, thanks to profiting obscenely from the commercial success of the "Little Brain" doll, a product spin-off from a popular TV series (also Malik's creation) in which "Great Minds" dolls engaged historical wise men in fictional dialogues. If that sounds like a stretch, wait till you get a load of such thematically burdened secondary characters as Malik's feisty mistress Mila Milo (an activist intellectual out to save the world), his secretive sloe-eyed new love Neela Mahendra, and his friend Jack Rhinehart, a dusky former war correspondent who emulates his obvious model Hemingway in more ways than one. The story's ostensible premise is Malik's wary detente with the "furies "(including the classical personified ones, an uncaught serial killer of young women, and the resentful energies of indigent societies) that he sees all around him. But it's really a framework on which to hang fusillades of commentary on such topical ephemera as the film Gladiator, the newsworthy doings of Elian Gonzalez, Monica Lewinsky, Slobodan Milosevic, Tiger Woods, and others; "George W. Gush's boredom and Al Bore's gush," and anything else that catches Malik's jaundiced eye. It all reads like a slightly more exotic Saul Bellow novel (there are explicit echoes of both Herzog and Mr. Sammler's Planet), with perhaps a soupçon of Philip Roth's angry comedies of waning sexual impulses waxing eloquent. 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).
