His anger is not even noticed in America where everyone is angry about something, and where there are even people like him who are angry about everything. “America is the great devourer, and so I have come to America to be devoured,” he says. Solly has escaped Europe precisely because of what America is. He hates its foreign policies, its garish superficiality, its casual racism, its self-satisfied neediness to make anything worthwhile in the world into a commodity it owns.

This is somewhat strange because one of the few things that Solly knows he is really, really angry about is America. His commercial success has allowed him to bail from his academic Cambridge donnery (dondom? donnage?) to join the New York glitterati as a media luvvie.

In fact he made a fortune through dolls - not by collecting but by creating a best selling one called Little Brain.

Every comment, every sound, every person grates. Everything irritates him from the insane chat of the cleaning lady to the trivialities of the gossip mags. Not just the people but also the architecture, the food, the culture. Solly, a cosmopolitan native of the sub-continent, is aware of his paradoxical situation. But in an atheist like Solly Solanka it can only be bottled up and leak out unexpectedly for the most trivial reason. If one were religious, it might be directed toward God in a Job-like tirade. It is anger that cannot be assuaged by apology or bought off by restitution. It is anger without a source and without any definite object, pure anger at being alive. In 2007, he began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University.Īnger, unaccountable, existentially driven, psychologically depressing, non-directive anger is the subject matter of Fury. In June 2007, he was appointed a Knight Bachelor for 'services to literature', which 'thrilled and humbled' him. Faced with death threats and a fatwa (religious edict) issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, which called for him to be killed, he spent nearly a decade largely underground, appearing in public only sporadically. His fourth novel led to some violent protests from Muslims in several countries. His style is often classified as magical realism, while a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world. Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, a novelist and essayist, set much of his early fiction at least partly on the Indian subcontinent. The Satanic Verses (1988), novel of Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie led Ruholla Khomeini, the ayatollah of Iran, to demand his execution and then forced him into hiding his other works include Midnight's Children (1981), which won the Booker prize, and The Moor's Last Sigh (1995).

Fury rushdie