Fury

Fury
Image source: Google

Rating: 3.7/5

Author: Salman Rushdie

Paperback: 272 pages

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

Publication Date: 2001

Language: English

Genre: Psychological fiction

ISBN-10: 9780099421863

ISBN-13: 978-0099421863

ASIN: 0099421860

Cost: Rs. 296.80 (kindle edition)

Plot:

In the summer of 2000, New York is a city living at breakneck speed in an age of unprecedented decadence. And into this tumultuous city arrives Malik Solanka. His life has been a sequence of exits. He has left in his wake his country, family, not one but two wives and now a child. But as his latest marriage disintegrates and the fury builds within him he fears he will become dangerous to those he loves. And so he steps out of his life once again and begins a new one in New York.

But New York is a city boiling with fury. Around Malik, cab drivers spout obscenities, a serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete and the petty spats and bone-deep resentments of the metropolis threaten to engulf him, as his own thoughts, emotions and desires reach breaking point.

Review:

Malik Solanka, the fifty-five-year-old former Cambridge professor and improbably successful dollmaker is the main protagonist of Fury. As his wife and small son lay asleep in their London home, he'd stood over her with a knife "for a terrible, dumb minute" feeling, as Rushdie puts it:

                                                      "murder on the brain."

He metaphorically stands for the destructive nature of one’s fury.

Once Solanka is thrown out of the family, he flees to New York. Now, Solanka lives alone in a rich Manhattan apartment. As he wanders around he brings forth his thoughts of the dull, superficial and false nature of the neighbourhoods. Rushdie tells:

"If he could cleanse the whole machine, then maybe the bug, too, would end up in the trash."

The fury in Solanka takes a turn for the worst ; after he drinks himself into a series of blackouts and awakens to read that a man matching his description has killed yet another New York City woman. This is when readers really indulge in the character’s evolution which has reached a whole new destructive level.

This book isn’t as fast paced as it seems. Infact, it’s quite unhurried in its approach of story telling. The ‘past’ in the book offers a lot of actions but the ‘present’ takes it slow.

Rushdie has a rhythmic quality to his writing. Like:

“Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row of electric chairs, those dealers in death's democracy, where everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could come to die side by side? Who paved Paradise and put up a parking lot? Who settled for George W. Gush's boredom and Al Bore's gush?”

About the Author:

Of Indian origin, Sir Ahmad Salman Rushdie born on 18 June, 1947 is one of the best living writers in English; combining historical fiction with magical realism. He is the author of twelve novels—Grimus, Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of nonfiction—Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line and co-edited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.