Fury in Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Apr 14, 2008 Inder rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction, colonial-postcolonial, 21st-century, new-york

I read this a while back, and I did not love it the way I have loved Rushdie's other work. Perhaps it's brilliant, but I just don't get it.

First, there was the autobiography of a dirty middle-aged man aspect. It turns out much of the book was semi-factual, and Rushdie really did leave his loyal wife who stuck by him through his exile and hiding for a hot young thing (with a scar on her arm - sheesh, we're pushing "semi-autobiographical" here). Well, good for you, but don't act like you're someho ...more

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Dec 05, 2009 Tiffany rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books, 1001-books__fromlist

"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 wo "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.

And boy, ain't that fury furious. Solanka, who has a good job, a successful invention, and a loving family, one day finds that he's about to do something out of fury, without realizing he's about to do it. He hightails it to America to get away from this furious act, and America makes him furious, too. Its consumerism, commercialism, fakeness all make him furious.

This book, I've inferred, is set in 2000 in New York (we know it's New York; I'm guessing it's 2000), and one thing I love about Salman Rushdie is how he uses pop culture references as metaphors and implicit setting: Bush/Gore, Springsteen, Barbie dolls, Ricki Lake/Jerry Springer, Elian Gonzalez, etc., etc., etc. For the most part, he doesn't *say* "The Springsteen concert just happened here in New York where he's touring for such-and-such album, therefore I'm hinting it's the year 2000"; and even when he *does* say things like mentioning that a billboard advertises Ellen DeGeneres' upcoming appearance (which could be fact-checked and is a very real world thing, not an I'm-reading-a-fiction-book-which-means-these-events-are-made-up), it's along with the hypocrisy of someone publicly wanting to go through a "private" life choice. The references not only set the timeframe of the novel, they also push that fury-at-American-consumerism-and-commercialism-and-fakeness one more level. And that's all in addition to the plot of "How's this guy going to get rid of his anger? Is he always going to be furious? And who's the behatted murderer?"

The final storyline (as in the last, or maybe the next-to-last, storyline introduced, and the one the book ends on) made the book lose a little greatness in my head. It felt superfluous and unnecessary, and drew away from the meat of the book. (It was another storyline of fury, though.) ...more

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Jan 07, 2008 Yelena Malcolm rated it really liked it

This was certainly not the book I was expecting from Salman Rushdie. It was extremely naked in its emotions and I found it wonderfully revealing.

A man abandons his life in his mid-50s because he can't control the rage inside himself and flees across the ocean to lose himself in New York. The actions of the book are so far less important, in my estimation, than the exploration of the emotion of fury, its many manifestations, and how one man goes about recognizing and addressing them.

But fans of ...more

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