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BOOKS
Fun And Fury In New York
Bombay to London to New York and the new ground
beneath Salman Rushdie's feet is still quaking.
By S. Prasannarajan
 The
countryside is for cows and the city is for Salman Rushdie. Cities define
him, cities devastate him, cities seduce him. The run-away storyteller,
the model migrant of post-modern fiction, never reaches home-homeseeking
is a permanent state of mind, rather a state of story. And look at his
latest waystation, the refugee's new resort. It's a city where the zeitgeist
is captured by musicals about lovable lions and movies about the gladiatorial
decadence of imperial Rome. The city of Hillary vs Rudy, of the televised
demonology of Hannibal-the-Cannibal Castro and the totemic celebration
of Elian Gonzalez. The city where the cultural high points are marked
by Tony Soprano and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Our Lady of the Thong,
or Minnie Mouth. Where Islamic cab drivers are prone to pronounce judgements
like "Hey! American man! You are a godless homosexual rapist of your
grandmother's pet goat." Where George W. Gush's boredom triumphs
over Al Bore's gush. It's the city of perpetual delirium. And "he
had come to New York as the Land Surveyor came to the Castle: in ambivalence,
in extremis, and in unrealistic hope. He had found his billet, a more
comfortable one than the poor surveyor's, and ever since then had been
roaming the streets, looking for a way in, telling himself that the great
World-City could heal him, a city child, if he could only find the gateway
to its magic, invisible, hybrid heart."
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FURY: A NOVEL
By Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape/Rupa
Price: Rs 395
Pages: 272
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The Kafka reference
is partly true; and if New York is the millennial castle waiting for privileged
land surveyors, Salman Rushdie in Manhattan is K redux in an age of Faux
Americana plus Fairy Americana. And it marks a well-deserved pause in
a passage characterised by the midnight cry of mutant freedom and the
shame of bastardised history, by the Jahilian discoveries of faith and
doubt and the Imam's rage against imagination, by the last hurrah of a
lost world and the quaking love story of a modern day Orpheus. It's a
rare passage in the history of fiction, and the exceptional facts of Rushdie's
life after The Satanic Verses has given a kind of palimpsestic poignancy
to his post-fatwa works-beneath the whirling, high-velocity art lies a
testament of displacement and despair, a very personal search for peace.
But peace is elsewhere, beyond the skylines of New York, for the Fury
is hovering over the refugee's Upper West Side sublet, the dark goddess
is propelling him mad: "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."
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EXCERPT
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Professor Malik Solanka, retired historian
of ideas, irascible dollmaker, and since his recent fifty-fifth
birthday celibate and solitary by his own (much-criticized) choice,
in his silvered years found himself living in a golden age. Outside
his window a long, humid summer, the first hot season of the third
millennium, baked and perspired. The city boiled with money. Rents
and property values had never been higher, and in the garment industry
it was widely held that fashion had never been so fashionable. New
restaurants opened every hour. Stores, dealerships, galleries struggled
to satisfy the skyrocketing demand for ever more recherche produce:
limited edition olive oils, three-hundred-dollar corkscrews, customized
Humvees, the latest anti-virus software, escort services featuring
contortionists and twins, video installations, outsider art, featherlight
shawls made from chin-fluff of extinct mountain goats. So many people
were doing up their apartments that supplies of high-grade fixtures
and fittings were at a premium. There were waiting lists for baths,
doorknobs, imported hardwoods, antiqued fireplaces, bidets, marble
slabs. In spite of the recent falls in the value of Nasdaq index
and the value of Amazon stock, the new technology had the city by
the ears: the talk was still of start-ups, IPOs, interactivity,
the unimaginable future that had just begun to begin. The future
was a casino, and everyone was gambling, and everyone expected to
win.
On Professor Solanka's street, 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. There was a tall green-eyed
young woman with steeply slanting Central European cheekbones who
particularly caught his sexually abstinent but still roving eye.
Her spiky strawberry-blonde hair stuck out clown-fashion from under
a black D'Angelo Vodoo baseball cap, her lips were full and sardonic,
and she giggled rudely behind a perfunctory palm as old-world, dandyish,
cane-twirling little Solly Solanka in straw Panama hat and cream
linen suit went by on his afternoon walk. Solly: the college identity
he'd never cared for but had not entirely managed to lose.
(c) Salman Rushdie 2001
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That can be said about Fury the novel too, an
ebony black enchantment of the first order. Rushdie's receptacle of the
moment is Professor Malik Solanka, disillusioned academic, famed dollmaker,
a man with an eventful back-story, with Bombay and London as locales,
and an uncertain future, and currently a solitary monk in Manhattan. His
fame began in the late 1980s when he resigned his position at King's College,
Cambridge, and turned his private eccentricity into a prime-time cult:
the brainy doll epic, The Adventures of Little Brain, Dr Frankenstein's
monstrously intellectual doll. Then, soon after his former Cambridge buddy,
a Derrida lookalike called Kristof Waterford-Wajda, or Dubdub, Solanka
left his second wife and a three-year-old son with a celestial name, Asmaan,
and crossed the Atlantic. A spiky-haired doll was his only companion.Well,
there is a pre-Cambridge back-story, datelined Bombay, about the stepfather's
sexual sin against Malik and the boy confiding the perverse horror to
the little dolls in his bedroom. Though, Bombay will always be with him,
as "his damned Yoknapatawpha, his accursed Malgudi, which had shaped
his destiny and whose memory he had suppressed for over half a lifetime".
So, after the distant loss and recent despair, New York, the new ground
beneath his feet, has to be nirvana.
It is and it isn't, and the furies are still
there. Here the serial killer wears a Panama hat and he kills with concrete,
and his scalped victims look like broken dolls. Here, even the plumbers'
Jewish story is worth a Hollywood script. In this city of permanent astonishments,
Solanka's private hermit kingdom, a duplex on the Upper West Side, begins
to be shaken by furious intrusions, most mysteriously manifested in the
ritualistic death of a friend, courtesy his association with a secret
society, S&M, a sexual black joke that stands for Single&Male.
Solanka, whose doll enterprise now a successful cybernetic allegory, is
now walking through other people's story, "walking like a phantom
through a city that was in the middle of a story which didn't need him
as a character". But he is destined to be a character in other people's
story, and the first major story that traps him in New York is that of
Mila Milo, the second name a shortened version of Milosevic, a Serbian
poet. The "beautiful, accursed" Mila for a while becomes the
doll on his lap, reliving her own back-story about forbidden father fixation.
But Solanka's sanyas takes a high-velocity romantic leap when Neela Mahendra,
a tv documentary producer, a "dark Venus" whose beauty first
strikes the sanyasi like a "galaxy of fire", comes to overwhelm
his life. She is "the last big emotional gamble of his life",
furia as ecstasy. She too is trapped in her own back-story, and Solanka
steps into it only to find himself transported into the distant South
Pacific island of Lilliput Blefuscu, Mahendra's ancestral home where Indo-Lilly
revolutionaries are fighting for the establishment of Filbistan (you can't
miss the place). As the Andalusian climax in The Moor's Last Sigh, the
Filbistan denouement in Fury is high action and slow salvation. Though,
for the professor, salvation can only mean reaching out to his son Asmaan,
which means sky. No other father may have done this love act ever before,
such a leaping brilliance in which laughter and tragedy exist in perfect
disharmony.
A great leap in imagination, and Fury further
celebrates the manic brilliance of one of fiction's finest practitioners.
True, literary voyeurists are certain to reduce the novel to an allegory
in the same size of their intellect, what with the recently separated
Rushdie's own acquisition of a dark-Venus girlfriend in New York, and
to whom the book is dedicated. Fury is much more than Rushdie's full-fledged
salaam America (the first salute was in The Ground Beneath Her Feet),
with his own back-story. As transmigration is an overwhelming motif in
the sprawling Rushdistan, a great landmass in contemporary imagination,
Fury, a minor work by a master, too is about the breakneck ascent of the
outsider-the context of city meditation and the cultural freak show doesn't
dilute the text, which continues to challenge the pixilated pretence of
his waystations. And Salman Rushdie is having fun, despite the furies.
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