Fury (2001), Salman Rushdie
Rushdie always reveals so much of himself through his writing and it is easy to see how his perceptions have changed since his exile from his homeland. This novel comes as an eerily timely insight into the time bomb that was growing in the hearts and minds of people around the world prior to the attack on Manhattan’s World Trade Centre. The novel missed out on being a prediction by a narrow margin.
Fury is not a novel you can read in short bursts while sitting on a toilet or waiting for the kettle to boil. It is entirely engaging and very fast paced, and it also contains the longest paragraphs and verbal diatribes of any I have read before. I have daily train rides of up to half an hour and I often had trouble finding where to put my bookmark when the train pulled up and I was in the middle of a 6 line sentence. Only Rushdie could pull it off with such resounding brilliance and beauty in every word he pours onto a page and into the eyes of the reader.
He writes the truth, the whole, ugly, gritty, profrane and scary truth. It’s a truth that hadn’t been revealed in all its hideous glory when the book was written, but something the world is now facing and yet people still try to hide from it. To hide from that Fury that lies within us all. Rushdie was brave enough to write it and smart enough to know how without offending the country that now protects him.
I was going to recommend that Jeremy read this novel as an introduction to Rushdie’s writing. I was thinking that the content and setting of this novel would interest him more (and confuse him less) than his earlier novels set in, or surrounding, Bombay and its rich and diverse histories. As he is an American, I’m sure Jeremy would find this novel interesting, I’m just not sure if he’ll ever have the long bursts of available time to read a novel with 5-page paragraphs.
Fury is not a novel you can read in short bursts while sitting on a toilet or waiting for the kettle to boil. It is entirely engaging and very fast paced, and it also contains the longest paragraphs and verbal diatribes of any I have read before. I have daily train rides of up to half an hour and I often had trouble finding where to put my bookmark when the train pulled up and I was in the middle of a 6 line sentence. Only Rushdie could pull it off with such resounding brilliance and beauty in every word he pours onto a page and into the eyes of the reader.
Only a wild optimist, a stupid brain-dead Pollyanna or Pangloss, throws away what’s most precious, what’s so rare and satisfies his deepest need, which you know and I know you can’t even name or look at without the shutters closed and lights out, you have to put a cushion on your lap to hide it until somebody comes along who’s smart enough to know what to do, somebody whose own unspeakable need just happens to make a perfect fit with your own.
He writes the truth, the whole, ugly, gritty, profrane and scary truth. It’s a truth that hadn’t been revealed in all its hideous glory when the book was written, but something the world is now facing and yet people still try to hide from it. To hide from that Fury that lies within us all. Rushdie was brave enough to write it and smart enough to know how without offending the country that now protects him.
I was going to recommend that Jeremy read this novel as an introduction to Rushdie’s writing. I was thinking that the content and setting of this novel would interest him more (and confuse him less) than his earlier novels set in, or surrounding, Bombay and its rich and diverse histories. As he is an American, I’m sure Jeremy would find this novel interesting, I’m just not sure if he’ll ever have the long bursts of available time to read a novel with 5-page paragraphs.
posted by Eliza at
2:05 pm
