Salman Rushdie “Rage”
The Fury novel is both similar to other Rushdie books and stands apart because of a completely different atmosphere. One review described it as “a shocking insight into the darkest corners of the human soul.”
“Rage” is a diagnosis to modern society and at the same time a recipe for curing a deadly disease. The novel has features of magical realism, a detective story, a thriller, there is something from a philosophical parable and a love story.
Some facts about the author
Scandalous fame haunts Salman Rushdie as surely as Muslim fanatics. The halo of religious conflict fuels interest in the writer’s books, but the conflict itself has forced the last 30 years to move from place to place, confuse traces and celebrate his birthday every year on different days. What is the reason for such persistent hatred?
- Born in India, father is a successful businessman. When the boy was 14 years old, he was sent to study in England. He studied history at Cambridge, worked as a journalist, tried himself in literature.
- In 1981, he won the Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children.
- In 1988, the novel-parable “Satanic Verses” was published. The story is fictional, but in one of the characters the image of the Prophet Muhammad is clearly visible. The character does not present the central figure of Islam in the best light.
- In 1989, the spiritual leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa (decree, decree), in which he sentenced the writer to death.
- The sentence can be executed in absentia: that is, if a devout Muslim kills Salman Rushdie anywhere in the world, this will be considered the fulfillment of the order of the Ayatollah. In addition, the killer will receive a reward of $ 2 million.
- Although Khomeini himself died in the same 1989, the sentence has not lost its force, and extremists continue to hunt for the writer to this day.
- In 2000 he moved to the USA, where he still lives.
- Rushdie was knighted by the Queen in 2007.
The work of Salman Rushdie does not fit into the framework of one genre. The magical realism and compositional structure of the parable coexist with acute social themes, for example, the fate of emigrants.
His signature style and chiseled literary language, which causes a lot of problems for translators, cannot be confused with anything. Critics put him on a par with such figures as Kafka, Bulgakov and Borges.
“Rage” summary
The life of the protagonist before the illness almost exactly repeats the biography of the author. Malik Solanka is from Bambay, his parents are very wealthy people sent their son to study in England, where he graduated with honors from Cambridge and became a teacher.
At the beginning of the novel, Malik is no longer a young, successful professor with a good reputation in the scientific community. He has a wife and a growing son. But a strange anxiety settles in the soul: at first it pushes the hero to leave the university and become a puppeteer. This attempt to escape from his life alerted those around him, but did not solve Malik’s internal problems.
The hero becomes more and more convinced that he is possessed by an inexplicable illness of the soul – at times uncontrollable rage covers him. Seizures are becoming more frequent. The scary thing is that, returning to a normal state of mind, Malik had a very vague idea of what he was doing and where he was in a fit of rage. It happened that he saw blood on his hands, but had no idea to whom it belonged.
In desperation, in order not to harm his family, the hero leaves his family and flies overseas to New York.
Malik hopes a change of scenery will moderate his rages and heal him. He was cruelly mistaken: the city is thoroughly saturated with hatred, people are aggressive. If you look closely, you can see how ancient Roman furies are circling over New York, feeding on the energy of numerous conflicts …
Read Fury online to find out how the protagonist manages to recover from painful uncontrollable cruelty and find the strength to accept this world.