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Fury by Salman Rushdie Recommendation: •
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Heart of Darkness I’ve never been much of a fan of Salman Rushdie. Reading that his new novel, Fury, was set in New York caught my attention and I decided to read it in the days following the terrorist attack. There’s a darkness of character and action throughout the book that deepened my gloom. In some ways, the last thing I wanted to read was an explanation of the title: “Life is fury, he’d thought. Fury – sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal – drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise – the terrifying 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 fucking limb.” I plunged into the darkness of Fury and read it through. I’m still not a fan of Rushdie. Steve Hopkins, September 19, 2001
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