I'm in the middle - actually, a little past the middle - of Salman Rushdie's recent novel Fury, and it is absolutely blowing my mind with how good it is. How have I never read this guy before? There are passages like the following (which I am using for my position paper, due tomorrow) that completely set my brain on fire:

Give me a name, America, make of me a Buzz or Chip or Spike. Bathe me in amnesia and clothe me in your powerful unknowing. Enlist me in your J. Crew and hand me my mouse ears! No longer a historian but a man without histories let me be. I'll rip my lying mother tongue out of my throat and speak your broken English instead. Scan me, digitize me, beam me up. If the past is the sick old Earth, then, America, be my flying saucer. Fly me to the rim of space. The moon's not far enough.

Hell, yeah! The passage states, more clearly than any other writer I have read, one of my biggest criticisms of this country. The homogenization, the assimilation of all cultures into a flat landscape lined with Starbucks, Kinko's, McDonald's. Resistance is futile. Throw off your political ideals and slip on these khakis from The Gap! Decorate your abode in Pottery Barn! You want to be cool, to fit in, don't you?

There's another passage, which I just read on the bus coming back from class, that describes Neela, the unaccountably gorgeous Indian ex-girlfriend of the protagonist's best friend, not through direct description, but through the reactions of others to her beauty:

They [the protagonist and Neela] sat on a bench near the pond, and all around them dog walkers were colliding with trees, Tai Chi practitioners lost their balance, rollerbladers smashed into one another, and people out strolling just walked right into the pond as if they'd forgotten it was there. Neela Mahendra gave no sign of noticing any of this. A man walked past with an ice cream cone, which, owing to his sudden but comprehensive loss of hand-to-mouth coordination, completely missed his tongue and instead made contact, messily, with his ear. Another young fellow began, with every appearance of genuine emotion, to weep copiously as he jogged by.

I'm not sure why I've never picked up Rushdie's fiction before, perhaps because of all the controversy caused by The Satanic Verses, but I'm a believer now. I've read the first 160 pages of this in two days, and after I'm done, will be craving more. Zadie Smith (herself an excellent writer) gushed over Rushdie in her recent reading at The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, and now I can see why.

Buy this book. It's $10.36 in trade paperback from Amazon. Ten dollars is a pittance for the pleasure of setting your mind and soul afire with this astonishing prose. You will thank me.

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Now Reading:
Fury by Salman Rushdie

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