"Fury" by Salman Rushdie *****

• Summer Read with Beth
• Indian author
• Originally published in 2001
• Characters: 
• Professor Solanka, retired from academia, left wife and child and fled from London to New York City, struggling with his fury, his father was the creator of Little Brain doll
• "Great Minds" dolls....description on page l6
• Krysztof Waterford-Wajda, aka Dubdub, friend from Oxford
• Mila: young woman with "Papi" complex, "special thing turned out to be the collection and repair of damaged people", gets involved with Solanka, suggests new generation of dolls, Mila as incarnation of a doll
• Akasz Kronos, the new cyber-doll, leader of the Puppet Kings....."deep and unimprovable flaw in his character that made him unable to consider the issue of the general good, intended them to guarantee nobody's survival or fortune but his own."...p.139
• Jack Rhineheart....friend of Solanka, got caught up by S & M Club, murdered by them
• Neela....wife of Jack Rhinehart, killer beauty, loyal to home nation, broke through Solanka's fury, turned tide to love and hope, ruffled his hair, unlocked his childhood nightmare
• Vocabulary:
• sanyasi: Hindu, a wandering beggar; ascetic
• solepcism: extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one's feelings, desires,etc.; egoistic self-absorption
• Notes:
• Solanka came to the US to detach from his fury, "Bathe me in amnesia and clothe me in your powerful unknowing."...p.51
• Mysterious deaths of female socialites scare Solanka, the living dolls ("behind their high-style exteriors, beneath that perfectly lucent skin, they were so stuffed full of behavioral chips, so thoroughly programmed for action, so perfectly groomed and wardrobed, that there was no room left in them for messy humanity.....thus represented the final step in the transformation of the cultural history of the doll.  Having conspired in their own dehumanization, they ended up as mere totems of their class, the class that ran America, which in turn ran the world, so that an attack on them was also, if you cared to see it that way, an attack on the great American empire.....A dead body on a street....coming down to earth, looks a lot like a broken doll."
•  Secret society, the S & M Club, Single & Male
• Solanka travels to Neela's home country, where the leader adopted the persona of Solanka's cyber leader
• Night of the Furies, confronted by Eleanor, Mila, and Neela all at once in his bedroom
• References to "fury":
• p.19...Dubdub's idea, "In The Rat Hole.  Construction of a Machine without a Purpose. Fury."
• p.30...."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."
• p.70...Let's get to anger, okay? Let's get to the goddamn fury that actually kills.  Tell me, where is murder bred?"
• p.100..."Fury stood above him like a cresting Hokusai wave.  Little Brain was his delinquent child grown into a rampaging giantess, who now stood for everything he despised and trampled beneath her giant feet all the high principles he had brought her into being to extol; including, evidently, his own."
• p.114..."America, because of its omnipotence, is full of fear; it fears the fury of the world and renames it envy, or so my dad used to say."...Mila
• p.135...notion of dollification..."Above all the matter of sentences that must never be completed, because to complete them would release the fury, and the crater of that explosion would consume everything at hand."...exploitation of children
• p.178..."Furis.  This was the self she had never fully shown, Mila as Fury,the world-swallower, the self as pure transformative energy."....driven by desire to create virtual world for Solanka's new doll series
• p.185..."Furious and newly kindled desire was hard to give up for that calmer, gentler old flame."
• Quotes:
• p.4..."...well heeled white youths lounged in baggy garments on roseate stoops, stylishly simulating indigence while they waited for the billionairedom that would surely be along sometime soon."
• p.6..."America insulted the rest of the planet.....by treating such bounty with the shoulder-shrugging casualness of the inequitably wealthy."
• p.8..."While we marionettes dance, who is yanking our strings?"
• p.8..."...the epoch of analog (which was to say also of the richness of language, of analogy) was giving way to the digital era, the final victory of the numerate over the literate."
• p.35..."This is the country of the diminutive.  Even the stores and eating places got friendly fast."
• p.45..."He felt like one of the shuffling thousands in the old movies of Chaplin and Fritz Lang, the faceless ones doomed to break their bodies on society's wheel while knowledge exercised power over them from on high."
• p.51..."We were our stories , and when we died, if we were very lucky, our immortality would be in another such tale."
• p.56..."America's need to make things American, to own them was the mark of an odd insecurity.".....American Graffiti,
• p.58..."...Solanka was sure he could see, in his friend's eyes, the self-loathing fire of his rage.  it took him a long while to concede that Jack's suppressed fury was the mirror of his own."
• p.65..."When one is too young to have accumulated the bruises of ones own experience, one can choose to put on, like a hair shirt, the sufferings of one's world."
• p.81..."When a man without faith mimicked the choices of the faithful, the result was likely to be both vulgar and inept."
• p.87..."Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused hi, and its vast potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction.  What he opposed in it he must also attack in himself."
• p.89..."This about New York Professor Solanka liked a lot--this sense of being crowded out by other people's stories, of walking like a phantom through a city that was in the middle of a story which didn't need him as a character."
• p.128..."There is that within us which is capricious and for which the language of explanation is inappropriate.  We are made of shadow as well as light, of heat as well as dust.Naturalism, the philosophy of the visible, cannot capture us, for we exceed.  We fear this in ourselves, our boundary[breaking, rule-disproving, shape-shifting, transgressive, trespassing shadow-self, the true ghost in our machine."
• p.158...."We all fear that the cold, machine-like thing in human  nature will destroy our magic and song."....Rushdie repeats this notion in "Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights"
• p.179..."Laptop as lapdancer."
• p.183..."For the real problem was damage not to the machine but to the desirous heart, and the language of the heart was being lost."
• p.184..."This was the only subject:  the crushing of dreams in a land where the right to dream was the national ideological cornerstone, the pulverizing cancellation of personal possibility at a time when the future was opening up to reveal vistas of unimaginable, glittering treasures such as no man or woman had ever dreamed of before."...this theme is returned to in "Two Years....."
• p.187....Links were electronic now, not narrative.  Everything existed at once."
• p.188..."He found himself inhabiting a world he greatly preferred to the one outside his window...".....his cyberworld...."...the river of Solanka's imagination was fed from a thousand streams.
• p.193..."Rights are never given by those who have them....only taken by those in need."
• p,206..."For furia could be ecstasy too, and Neela's love was the philosopher's stone that made possible the transmuting alchemy.  Rage grew out of despair; but Neela was hope fulfilled."
• p.228..."The speed of contemporary life, thought Malik Solanka, outstripped the heart's ability to respond."
• "Men are less hesitant about harming someone who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared.....Because love is held together by a chain of obligation which, since men are a sorry lot, is broken on every occasion in which their own self-interest is concerned; but fear is held together by a dread of punishment which will never abandon you."....answer to question whether it is better to be loved or hated by leader of Blefescu
• Review:  As always, I am a bit breathless when I finish a novel by Rushdie.  The vigor of his ideas and the multitude of analogies he draws from contemporary events, history, and mythology are nothing short of astonishing.  This novel, set in New York City, traces one academic man's journey from an existential crisis to efforts to drown out his fury, to his effort to face it and make meaning in  his life.  In my opinion, this novel is one of the more generally accessible reads because the plot is more clearly discernible than in several of his other works.  Per usual, the characters are at once humorous and terrifying in their humanity.  So take the ride, by all means, and hold onto your hat.  You will run smack into pathos, rage, passion, fear, with a smattering of love and hope.  Great novel!