"Fury" Discussion

Ooh, yay, and we have jjorge's input to look forward to as well! Things are lookin' up, I tells ya..!

The book...? (Why does Jack worry you?)

The book is like a suitcase packed by me - some good ideas, a semblance of order at the beginning, but all discipline gets lost and at the end things are just being thrown in, almost willy-nilly. Or, 'tis a bit like a stoned rave at the end, by a clever and learned person.

I really got put off by the whole Fiji thing.

I loved, as I said earlier, the musings about the mind-set of the western world, the disappointment, the being of New York, celebrity, the minor characters like the plumber and the cleaner.

I loved the concept of the dolls, but their weird apotheosis in Fiji? Pshaw!

<I'm sooooooooo happy the discussion is actually off and running. Need to review some things and then will be back.>

I agree about Fiji.

And the way it all got bundled into some sort of finish a plot machine!

And Neela - like who was SHE? Apart from Rushdie's fantasy thingy...

I was trying to flip through the book and re-acquaint myself with some things (I knew I shoulda taken notes) but that didn't go so well so I'll just speak from memory and correct myself (or accept correction) as needed.

Yeah, Neela sucked. She's Padma Lakshmi*, and that's nice, but as a character -- nothing! Long legs and traffic accidents and a scar does not a fully-fledged character make. I think Rushdie didn't want to replicate whatsername, the heroine of "The Ground Beneath Her Feet", who is also said to be based on Padma, but that left nothing interesting. ("The Ground Beneath her Feet" was much, MUCH better.)

Aside from the scar, did Neela have any (intended) flaws? Oh, bad driving. But other than that she was given such free reign as to her adorableness -- a nice love letter, a bad novel.

*Rushdie's real-life companion -- more on my "notes" thread.

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=62066&highlight=padma#62066

(Notes thread)

I DID like some of the "devices" - like the references to Gatsby as the "highest bouncer" of the American dream becoming Solanka in the bouncy castle at the end!

So - the "fury"- is it simply the disappointment referred to by Solanka? I am unsure if the connection to the classic furies really works...

Well, I thought that Neela was just silly. Honestly -- the idea of being so beautiful that the public falls apart? Also, why is she an acceptable age for his girlfriend, even though she's just a tiny bit older than Mila? And here's a wart you haven't noted... she hops into bed with Solanka though supposedly still caring for his friend.

Piffka, I agree. What's interesting is that while reading I thought she was so utterly preposterous, but then when I finished the book, I did research and found out she actually exists (in the person of Padma.) Down to the "effect" and traffic accidents (caused by, not participant in.)

Still, I didn't like her as a character. In both senses; I didn't have any particular affection for her, and I didn't think the characterization itself (i.e. the writing) was good.

Jack Rhinehart -- I think Rushdie wanted to write a book about class in America (or started a book, found it seemed to be about class, and pursued that angle), and Rhinehart feels shoehorned in. You can't have a book about class in America without an African-American character.

But Jack just feels wrong. Speech patterns, everything. I think that Rushdie has an amazing ear, an amazing eye, and an amazing ability to synthesize and organize -- take all the reality he perceives and put it together in amazing ways. Jack didn't feel real or observed -- he felt like a bit of this, a bit of that, mix together and spout Meaningful Soliliquys now and then. His (Jack's) family was much better -- I believe that they were observed. The college friend who commits suicide -- same. But Jack didn't work for me.

Now that you guys have finished, I can go into my biggest disappointment -- the sexual-abuse denouement. Come ON! Been done to death. Much more interesting to leave it without convenient explanation.

Gautam has read many of the same Indian novels that I have, and I wrote him right after I finished the book about the top-of-the-head thing. I KNOW I've seen that before, but can't remember if it was from another Rushdie novel or from someone else's novel. "The God of Small Things" comes to mind (by Arundhati Roy), but I'm just not sure. Gautam couldn't remember either, but agreed that it was not new.

It also softens the whole class/ America as demon aspect; are we supposed to believe that the terrorists were all sexually abused when they were boys? America genuinely calls forth that fury, and it's a cop-out to say that Solanka was just going through a little repressed-memory purge.

I wondered about the top-of-the-head problem. I thought it was related to some sort of religious practice or cultural abasement thing.

The sexual abuse was also a big disappointment -- talk about not new. Ugh. Between that and the various other unbelievable aspects, I think that Rushdie is not "getting" us. I'd say he thinks he really understands America, but he's missing out on a lot by believing we're icon-driven.

Neela/Padma stopping traffic? Who says? Her publicity agents??

The Furies also doesn't work. After dlowan questioned it I researched it a little. It doesn't follow the Greek pattern.

Piffka, did you get the top-of-the-head/ sexual abuse connection? I can explain if not.

A general note, especially to latecomers (of which I hope there are more): I tend to go through stages in reacting to a book. While I read it, I subscribe to the author's worldview (unless it's downright horrible) and can't really give an objective view of whether I like the book or not. (Me: "I just finished the book!" Hubby: "Did you like it?" Me: "I have no idea. Too soon to tell.") I then tend to go too far the opposite direction in finding flaws. If the book is of any quality, I eventually settle somewhere in the middle. If the book is not, I forget it.

Which is mostly to say, if some readers DID like the book, I'm very interested in your take, too, and will quite possibly agree. I find even bad Rushdie more interesting than 90% of what's out there.

That is true - it was to me a box full of interesting tidbits - and I do like those digressive novels full of this and that piece of analysis and image and allusion.

I do not think the Furies have to act like the classic Furies.

I found some things about the book v. interesting, despite my feeling that Rushdie was patting himself on the back for being so clever in so many ways. He does have a way of turning a phrase to make it sound new... I did not use post-its, as I meant to, but here is an example, nearly at the end, which made me laugh out loud.

"Malik Solanka, a traveler from an antique land, watching his son from the privacy of a grove of oaks, uncomplainingly allowed a black Labrador to sniff him. The dog moved on, having established that Solanka was not suitable for his purposes." pg. 256

Now, this shows both Rushdie, as Solanka, seeing himself as different and better than everyone else, but it also shows that he can be funny (perhaps inadvertently) about a dog.

Here, is, BTW, the poetic reference... which was begun in an earlier paragraph near this same citation, used to lampoon Tony Blair as Tony Ozymandias, and at the same time, show disdain for the fallen, broken UK which was once a mighty Empire.

Ozymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1817

He may think it is fallen and broken, the Empire, but he freely uses every facility and refers to the literature which that Empire has provided to mock it and its spawn, New York and the rest of us. I think he has sour grapes. Considering his disdain for India, it makes me wonder what he does appreciate. (Besides a traffic-stopping GF!)

Piffka, I missed your last post until now, somehow. Yes, that back-patting is off-putting. I didn't like several levels of self-aggrandizement, especially since the novel was so transparently autobiographical.

The Gallileo thing irritated me, for example -- clearly, Rushdie identifies with him, and even feels a bit superior. Yeah, yeah, think a lot of yourself, do ya? But then the reality hit. The man is under constant threat of death -- death! -- because of what he what he has said and his refusal to recant. (The fatwa was recently renewed, or whatever the terminology is. He's in very real danger.)

I was incredibly impressed that his first book after the fatwa was "Haroun and the Sea of Stories." Lovely, light-hearted, allegorical. His love for classics of kiddy-lit obvious. But what a way to deal with a death sentence, whimsy and humor rather than darkness and morbidity. I think the latter have taken over a bit, but I have a hard time judging him for that.

I made a thread about this already but thought I'd ask in this thread too just incase it was missed. I need a summary of the plot of the book. Just a basic synopsis really. But you probably don't want post it here just to prevent spoilers for other people so you can email it to me at [email protected]

I'm in a bad situation right now so I really need this

Thanks alot guys

I read the book in translation, alas, so trying to quote what Rushdie wrote I'm forced to translate it back into an English that's probably quite different from how Rushdie wrote it. But in any case, I wanted to quote a bit because I think it encapsulates a great deal of my opinion about the book. Rushdie here is writing about how Malik's narrative web-project about the Kings Dolls is unfolding, and on his way tries to characterise the nature of what the nature of the web does to narrative. Ironically, his characterisation seems to sumamrise what I see as the main flaws of "Fury" itself.

"In the world of imagination, the creative cosmos that started out very simply [..] to expand into this many-tentacled multimediamonster, questions didnt need to be answered; it was much better to find interesting new phrasings for them. The story also didn't need to get an end; it was even crucial [..] that it could go on nearly unlimitedly, while at regular intervals new adventures and new themes were added on to it, and new persons were introduced [..]. The original story was a skeleton [..], the structure for a fantasy creature that [..] fed itself with each sliver it found: the personal history of its creator, fragments of gossip, profound erudition, current events, high and low culture [..]. The looting of the world's storage of old stories and old history was wholly legitimate. Few web users were acquainted with the myths or even the facts of history; all that was needed was to give a fresh, contemporary twist to the old material. Transmutation was sufficient. [..]

Because the work never got into smoother waters, remaining a work-in-progress forever, a certain measure of sloppiness was unavoidable. The character [..] of persons and places changed sometimes as Solanka's image of his fictional universe became more clear. Certain storylines turned out to provide bigger opportunities than he had first realised and were expanded greatly. [..] Other broad lanes turned out to be dead-end alleys and were removed."

It's almost as if Rushdie, in these paragraphs, apologises to the reader for the weaknesses of his own novel. Some storylines are significantly more credible than others, some are significantly more carefully worked out than others. At the weaker points, where he ventures out into a new topic and then seemingly abandons all serious effort on it, bits and pieces are positively ridiculous. Other elements of the novel provide interesting and thought-provoking notions, without ever elaborating them into a sequence of events you can take seriously, let alone be emotionally involved by.

Just like on the web, the stimulus to inspiration and argumentation seems to have been considered the most important thing - or even enough of a thing - to hell with the traditional notion of creating a tight, cohesive story.

The best part of the novel I found, eventually, Malik's rants, sometimes poignantly spot-on, sometimes merely amusing in their unguided missile-like fervor. I LOL at many of them, grim laughs sometimes, and felt the perpetual need to quote bits to Anastasia. The worst parts must be those about Malik's love interests. They were of a preposterous implausibility that showed up an embarrasingly clear self-contented, middle-aged-male fantasy character (it's what ruined some of Bertolucci's and Wenders' later movies, just look at Stealing Beauty or Par Dela les Nuages).

All in all, it's great as a rather great length of half-finished, essayistic notes for some inspired, erudite, angry series of university lectures. As a novel it's not all that convincing.

(And that's my own half-finished, mere sketch of a note on what I remember thinking when I finished reading the book a month or so ago ;-))

Hmmm interesting. Thanks alot.
Could you possibly sum up the plot briefly?

Hi Dave,

Sorry, I wasnt respondig directly to your question, you just happened to have dug up a thread that I'd long planned to post to.

I wished I could help you, but as you perhaps have already gathered from the post above, there isn't much of a simple, coherent narrative plot to sum up.

He really takes the basic given of "erudite professor with a deep-seated bitterness and the unexpected hobby of making dolls flees from his inner demons to Manhattan, to there be torn back from the brink of madness to the all too eventful, fast-moving world of inspiration, success and adventure by successive romantic interests that rekindle his creative flame" to dig up and into a whole range of issues, preoccupations, political and cultural observations and personal obsessions - that I, at least can't really summarise one-two-three here.

Don't you people have these books-of-summaries? I used some now and again when I was in school ... ;-)

Hmmm, what does it say on the book's flyer? or cover sheet, or whatever you call the wrapper? P'haps a little trip to a book store or bookstore website?

At my distance from writing a class paper, given all the plagarism concerns going around and my lack of enthusiam for artifice in my own conversations, I would consider just telling the truth. You read a hundred pages, could see some beginnings of story development/or couldn't make heads or tails of it and why or why not. If I were a teacher, I would be looking for a thoughtful essay first of all.

But, I'm not.

Don't parrot someone else, either words or ideas. Always, always, cite someone else's words or ideas by acknowledgment. Their ideas can be triggers for your own opinions - so then, quote them.