fury

Title: Fury
Author: Salman Rushdie

publ: vintage (2002)
isbn: 0-999-44338-4

this book is about malik solanka who has left his wife and kid and is roaming the streets of new york. It seems that, according to the author, he is filled with fury for everything around him. Not just that, the author apparently goes on to say that each and every character, nay, the entire world itself is in the grip of enormous fury. If this was the point that rushdie was trying to convey to the reader, then I guess he has failed utterly in his endeavour. I didn’t see any such inexplicable amount of fury anywhere in the book. Whatever fury was there seemed not at all enough to justify the title of the book. Perhaps it is just that the impact is not properly felt as the book is by such an author as rushdie who usually handles such emotions as fury, anger, hatred, love, attachment, nostalgia, etc. in a nihilistic way. Therefore such an author not being able to create a successful novel with such things as fury as its central theme is not a big surprise.

intellectual judgements apart, I really enjoyed reading it. Because I never had any such expectations as a story with a proper structure from rushdie who never seemed to believe in a novel with a polished structure. Almost all of his books I have read I have enjoyed not for their theme or how he creates a well-finished novel, but just because of his magical writing style. This book also I enjoyed for the same reason. Just the experience of reading anything by rushdie, the greatest prose-stylist of our times, is in itself a reason for tremendous joy! And this book seemed very different from his other books I have read and beautiful in a cute way. And it didn’t feel boring at any point, and the pages were being flipped over at a pretty fast pace and I finished reading it in a very short time, in spite of its huge size.

Courtesy: ernakulam public library