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3.6 AVERAGE
3.6 AVERAGE
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for a free digital review copy – all opinions are my own!
Nero Golden is a powerfully rich man who lives in New York with his three sons. No one is really sure where they came from or what their backstories are. Their neighbor, Rene, is interested in film production and he quickly becomes intrigued with uncovering the secrets surrounding the Golden family in hopes of creating a film that tells their story.
I went into the story blind; I’d barely read the synopsis and I have never read any other works by Rushdie. From the very beginning, I could tell this author was setting up a very slow burn (reminiscent of The Gentleman in Moscow). The reader must be very patient and, in the end, that patience will be rewarded. The reader is required to do a lot of work in the meantime – dredge through long, very detailed paragraphs, keep separate (but connected) storylines straight, and continue to pick up the book when it feels difficult to do.
In all honesty, if this hadn’t been a free copy to review, I most likely would have marked it as a DNF (did not finish) and moved onto a new book. But sometimes, the fact that I feel obligated to finish a book is a good thing! (I felt the EXACT same way with The Gentleman in Moscow, but was sooooo happy when I had finished it because I ended up loving it!)
The Golden House felt much the same for me. I didn’t love it for most of the book, but I did like it very much once the book had wrapped it all up. It had very strong characters and the writing is excellent. The depth and detail show a true commitment level by Rushdie to give his audience a lot of bang for their buck. However, I do feel he could have accomplished the same goal with a little less density and length. By the end of the book, I was just glad it was over.
In conclusion, I think this was a good book. I ended up appreciating the slow burn and thought it was a great read for those that like a really good family drama. I think Rushdie is incredibly talented in character development and that aspect alone made the story worth reading! Since finishing the book, I have found myself thinking about the Goldens off and on. Interspersed throughout the story were events that were happening around the world, specifically New York City, during the 2000s and that made the story fun because it was reminiscent of those events (i.e.: the election of Barack Obama).
If you’ve read this one, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
(FULL DISCLOSURE: This reading experience may have felt much different for me had I had an actual book in my hand. I am starting to realize that I have a very difficult time connecting to books when I read them digitally – again, this was the same situation for me with The Gentleman in Moscow. I’m thinking I may have to stop reading review books on my iPad or Kindle because I’m not totally sure I’m being fair to them. Am I the only one with this problem, or do you feel it too?)
Nero Golden is a powerfully rich man who lives in New York with his three sons. No one is really sure where they came from or what their backstories are. Their neighbor, Rene, is interested in film production and he quickly becomes intrigued with uncovering the secrets surrounding the Golden family in hopes of creating a film that tells their story.
I went into the story blind; I’d barely read the synopsis and I have never read any other works by Rushdie. From the very beginning, I could tell this author was setting up a very slow burn (reminiscent of The Gentleman in Moscow). The reader must be very patient and, in the end, that patience will be rewarded. The reader is required to do a lot of work in the meantime – dredge through long, very detailed paragraphs, keep separate (but connected) storylines straight, and continue to pick up the book when it feels difficult to do.
In all honesty, if this hadn’t been a free copy to review, I most likely would have marked it as a DNF (did not finish) and moved onto a new book. But sometimes, the fact that I feel obligated to finish a book is a good thing! (I felt the EXACT same way with The Gentleman in Moscow, but was sooooo happy when I had finished it because I ended up loving it!)
The Golden House felt much the same for me. I didn’t love it for most of the book, but I did like it very much once the book had wrapped it all up. It had very strong characters and the writing is excellent. The depth and detail show a true commitment level by Rushdie to give his audience a lot of bang for their buck. However, I do feel he could have accomplished the same goal with a little less density and length. By the end of the book, I was just glad it was over.
In conclusion, I think this was a good book. I ended up appreciating the slow burn and thought it was a great read for those that like a really good family drama. I think Rushdie is incredibly talented in character development and that aspect alone made the story worth reading! Since finishing the book, I have found myself thinking about the Goldens off and on. Interspersed throughout the story were events that were happening around the world, specifically New York City, during the 2000s and that made the story fun because it was reminiscent of those events (i.e.: the election of Barack Obama).
If you’ve read this one, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
(FULL DISCLOSURE: This reading experience may have felt much different for me had I had an actual book in my hand. I am starting to realize that I have a very difficult time connecting to books when I read them digitally – again, this was the same situation for me with The Gentleman in Moscow. I’m thinking I may have to stop reading review books on my iPad or Kindle because I’m not totally sure I’m being fair to them. Am I the only one with this problem, or do you feel it too?)
There were many parts of this book that I liked. I have enjoyed many magical realism novels over the years. This is only my second Rushdie after midnights children. I liked the pop culture references particularly film, some I got, some I didn’t. There were some lines so good I highlighted them! But in the end I think it was the election analysis that spoilt it for me. It seemed superficial. Perhaps the reason 90m people didn’t vote is they didn’t like either choice...
There's no one quite like Sir Salman. This was an absolute joy from start to finish. Contrary to what I had thought, The Golden House (or gilded cage) is not simply a satire on Trump, but a glorious Rushdiyan tragedy where every thought references some delicious piece of popular culture from points throughout history. In fact Trump appears only as a background distraction.
Rushdie is having enormous fun even while his characters are wrestling with weight and fate. In one memorable paragraph, Rushdie gets from classical Greek myth to The Tempest via a complete lyric from Lieber and Stoller's "Stand By Me". When an author is having this much fun, it doesn't always translate into fun for the reader. Not so here. The Golden House is everything I could have hoped for from a Salman Rushdie novel, which is to say everything anyone could ever hope for from a work of new fiction.
Rushdie is having enormous fun even while his characters are wrestling with weight and fate. In one memorable paragraph, Rushdie gets from classical Greek myth to The Tempest via a complete lyric from Lieber and Stoller's "Stand By Me". When an author is having this much fun, it doesn't always translate into fun for the reader. Not so here. The Golden House is everything I could have hoped for from a Salman Rushdie novel, which is to say everything anyone could ever hope for from a work of new fiction.
Thanks to Random House and Netgalley for the advanced reader copy. Despite having multiple Salman Rushdie titles on my to-read list, this is the first of his books that I've read. I really enjoyed it although it was such a dark story. Along the lines of a Greek tragedy for sure. The writing kept the suspense up all throughout. You know from the very start that bad things are going to happen but the plotting was so good, I generally couldn't figure out what it was in advance. Add to that the wonderful political commentary and it was a winner for me.
This was a book that I really enjoyed and looked forward to getting back to every time I had to stop reading for a bit (you know those horrible moments when real life interferes with being able to read 24/7?). The story centers on a family of immigrants in New York, their mysterious past (exactly how did they make all that money?) and the relationships they forge in their new homeland.
The book is narrated by a friend of the family who is somewhat of an outsider to the very wealthy circles that Nero navigates, but the narrator is also a film maker who is in search of a story. Nero Golden and his family are the perfect subject for a documentary, and so the narrator begins working on this task but quickly becomes part of the sub plot within his own narrative.
The most intriguing aspect of this book for me was how Rushdie tackles of topics that are headlining our nightly news. Fiction is often the lens through which we see the world around us most clearly, and Rushdie does this adroitly. This was a great read.
Note: I received an ARC of this title form the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
The book is narrated by a friend of the family who is somewhat of an outsider to the very wealthy circles that Nero navigates, but the narrator is also a film maker who is in search of a story. Nero Golden and his family are the perfect subject for a documentary, and so the narrator begins working on this task but quickly becomes part of the sub plot within his own narrative.
The most intriguing aspect of this book for me was how Rushdie tackles of topics that are headlining our nightly news. Fiction is often the lens through which we see the world around us most clearly, and Rushdie does this adroitly. This was a great read.
Note: I received an ARC of this title form the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
I wasn't sure if I'd like this novel since it is loosely topical, taking place in the year or so leading up to the 2016 election and in the months that follow. Sometimes fictionalization of recent events leaves me dissatisfied. It somehow feels cheap and opportunistic. But Rushdie is so skillful at veiling the events (and personalities) that it blurs the lines between fiction and reality -- kind of like I felt in that year and those months, like it was some kind of terrible bad dream. In this passage the narrator, Rene, reflects on the reality he is living:
How does one live amongst one's fellow countrymen and countrywomen when you don't know which of them is numbered amongst the sixty-million-plus who brought the horror to power or among the ninety-million-plus who shrugged and stayed home, or when your fellow Americans tell you that knowing things is elitist and they hate elites, and all you have ever had is your mind and you were brought up to believe in the loveliness of knowledge, not that knowledge-is-power nonsense, but knowledge is beauty, and then all of that, education, art, music, film, becomes a reason for being loathed, and the creature out of Spiritus Mundi rises up and slouches toward Washington, D.C., to be born (359).
This was, by far, my favorite passage. One that captures something that I couldn't quite put words to about my own experience. It will stick with me and I will think of it when I try to make sense of this crazy time in my own head.
How does one live amongst one's fellow countrymen and countrywomen when you don't know which of them is numbered amongst the sixty-million-plus who brought the horror to power or among the ninety-million-plus who shrugged and stayed home, or when your fellow Americans tell you that knowing things is elitist and they hate elites, and all you have ever had is your mind and you were brought up to believe in the loveliness of knowledge, not that knowledge-is-power nonsense, but knowledge is beauty, and then all of that, education, art, music, film, becomes a reason for being loathed, and the creature out of Spiritus Mundi rises up and slouches toward Washington, D.C., to be born (359).
This was, by far, my favorite passage. One that captures something that I couldn't quite put words to about my own experience. It will stick with me and I will think of it when I try to make sense of this crazy time in my own head.
I liked this book, a very timely account of the American psyche. You can tell it was written quickly, so what? Salman is relevant, back to his kind of realism.
“I was brought up to believe in the loveliness of knowledge.”
This is a very lovely book. The voice of the story, call him “René”, is the narrator of the life of the family Golden, and of our times. The lines between those two stories is often blurred and indistinct. This is an extra-literary tale, and there are many lines that will remain with me. Salman Rushdie’s “The Golden House” is a book for our time, and a book to be read again and again in its timelessness.
This is a very lovely book. The voice of the story, call him “René”, is the narrator of the life of the family Golden, and of our times. The lines between those two stories is often blurred and indistinct. This is an extra-literary tale, and there are many lines that will remain with me. Salman Rushdie’s “The Golden House” is a book for our time, and a book to be read again and again in its timelessness.
Salman Rushdie is one of the greatest living writers in the world and few authors have his standing, not just as an author, but as a symbol of the vital importance of art and authorship. Perhaps because of his stature, he seems to feel obligated to tackle the big questions of society in many of his books. The Golden House is no different. Looking at the meaning of truth, identity, its reinvention, and family in the New York of Obama and Trump, this is another wide-ranging, all-encompassing novel.
The story is narrated by René, the son of Belgian academics who moved to New York, teach, and live in a house that backs up to a communal garden made by opening all the back yards into one shared space, a private park for the privileged few who live there. On the day Obama won the election, a family of mysterious origin, a father with three sons who have immigrated to America with great wealth and new names taken from the Roman emperors move into the grandest house in the garden. Their surname is Golden.
René wants to be a filmmaker and thinks this family is the stuff of cinema. He befriends them and is often at their home, even going on vacation with them to Florida. He learns their secrets. Their story is the stuff of Greek tragedy as their losses mount up and the father is ensnared by a Russian gold digger of mythological proportions.
The Goldens are a tragic family and as we learn their secrets, none of them are terribly surprising. There’s a lot of unnecessary obscurities. The secret country of origin, the terror attack that killed Nero Golden’s wife. They are real events so the elaborate not-naming of the country and the attack seems a waste of words. Even the grand reveal near the end is not a surprise as it’s been foreshadowed several times and anyone paying attention will have figured out the broad outline without the specifics.
I confess I am was disappointed in The Golden House. I expected it to become one of my favorite books of the year like Shalimar, the Clown or Midnight’s Children. Instead, I frequently found myself checking my progress, like a child in the back seat asking “Are we there yet?” I wanted the book to be over. It’s not that I wanted to quit unfinished, I just wanted to be done. I wanted to find out what happened, but it was such a chore to wade through it all. René could not seem to describe an event without dredging up every book and film that had some comparable or contrasting scene to compare with it. This could go on for pages and, too often, it did.
Through it all, there is this running commentary about society, some of it very curmudgeonly. As though René were a querulous old man shaking his cane and snarling about “Kids nowadays.” It sounds so odd as he is a youthful filmmaker. It seems as though René fades and Rushdie speaks through him because he often sounds like a grumpy, old fart.
The middle son is questioning his identity and his place on the gender spectrum. While the idea that people must not always be assigned a label is a liberating one, there seemed to be this grudge in Rushdie’s writing about the trans community and genderqueer activism. D sees a therapist who is a bad caricature of a dogmatic ideological enforcer culled from twitter rants. There’s a contemptible joke about a transbillionaire that gets trotted out twice.
On the other hand, his raging indictment of our national aversion to education, facts, news, truth, and integrity made my blood sing. If you love rants condemning the stupidity, the racism, the anti-Americanism of the people who voted for the Joker, as Donald Trump is called in the book, you will love that part. I sure did.
Don’t get me wrong, a disappointing Rushdie book is still better than the average book by a mile. I still think Rushdie is a great writer whose prose can have the rushing, headlong power of a raging river. He creates characters who are unique and intriguing and stories that are complex. He has important ideas to write about and interesting stories to tell. But he gets in his own way.
I can’t tell you how many times I was reading another never-ending list of literary and cinematic allusions while wondering if it would ever end. Some went on for pages. I read just one example to a friend, a short one at that, where René runs through a list of first names of directors and before I got to the end, my friend said “Stop! Stop! I can’t take it.” It was torturous. But why? Why is so much of the book flooded with literary listicles?
Rushdie rages against the anti-elitism that poisons America, that made so many of us so stupid as to vote for the Joker when we knew he was corrupt, racist, and rapacious. Is he shoving his cultural literacy in our faces to remind us that the elite are elite because they know things? I don’t think the people who despise intellect and expertise are likely to pick up Rushdie’s books in the first place. I don’t think Rushdie’s readers need a reminder that he is culturally literate. Familiarity with his work is part of being culturally literate, so what’s the point?
It feels like blasphemy to not like Rushdie’s book – especially since I have loved his others so much. It took me nearly ten days to read The Golden House because I constantly had to take a break, not to stop and think about the story, but because I was frustrated by the artifice of the unnamed country and the tedium of the constant cultural references. I wish I had liked it more. Instead, with such disappointment, I feel downright curmudgeonly.
The Golden House will be released September 5th. I received an e-galley in advance from the publisher through NetGalley.
The Golden House at Penguin Random House
Salman Rushdie author site
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/08/20/9780399592805/
The story is narrated by René, the son of Belgian academics who moved to New York, teach, and live in a house that backs up to a communal garden made by opening all the back yards into one shared space, a private park for the privileged few who live there. On the day Obama won the election, a family of mysterious origin, a father with three sons who have immigrated to America with great wealth and new names taken from the Roman emperors move into the grandest house in the garden. Their surname is Golden.
René wants to be a filmmaker and thinks this family is the stuff of cinema. He befriends them and is often at their home, even going on vacation with them to Florida. He learns their secrets. Their story is the stuff of Greek tragedy as their losses mount up and the father is ensnared by a Russian gold digger of mythological proportions.
The Goldens are a tragic family and as we learn their secrets, none of them are terribly surprising. There’s a lot of unnecessary obscurities. The secret country of origin, the terror attack that killed Nero Golden’s wife. They are real events so the elaborate not-naming of the country and the attack seems a waste of words. Even the grand reveal near the end is not a surprise as it’s been foreshadowed several times and anyone paying attention will have figured out the broad outline without the specifics.
I confess I am was disappointed in The Golden House. I expected it to become one of my favorite books of the year like Shalimar, the Clown or Midnight’s Children. Instead, I frequently found myself checking my progress, like a child in the back seat asking “Are we there yet?” I wanted the book to be over. It’s not that I wanted to quit unfinished, I just wanted to be done. I wanted to find out what happened, but it was such a chore to wade through it all. René could not seem to describe an event without dredging up every book and film that had some comparable or contrasting scene to compare with it. This could go on for pages and, too often, it did.
Through it all, there is this running commentary about society, some of it very curmudgeonly. As though René were a querulous old man shaking his cane and snarling about “Kids nowadays.” It sounds so odd as he is a youthful filmmaker. It seems as though René fades and Rushdie speaks through him because he often sounds like a grumpy, old fart.
The middle son is questioning his identity and his place on the gender spectrum. While the idea that people must not always be assigned a label is a liberating one, there seemed to be this grudge in Rushdie’s writing about the trans community and genderqueer activism. D sees a therapist who is a bad caricature of a dogmatic ideological enforcer culled from twitter rants. There’s a contemptible joke about a transbillionaire that gets trotted out twice.
On the other hand, his raging indictment of our national aversion to education, facts, news, truth, and integrity made my blood sing. If you love rants condemning the stupidity, the racism, the anti-Americanism of the people who voted for the Joker, as Donald Trump is called in the book, you will love that part. I sure did.
Don’t get me wrong, a disappointing Rushdie book is still better than the average book by a mile. I still think Rushdie is a great writer whose prose can have the rushing, headlong power of a raging river. He creates characters who are unique and intriguing and stories that are complex. He has important ideas to write about and interesting stories to tell. But he gets in his own way.
I can’t tell you how many times I was reading another never-ending list of literary and cinematic allusions while wondering if it would ever end. Some went on for pages. I read just one example to a friend, a short one at that, where René runs through a list of first names of directors and before I got to the end, my friend said “Stop! Stop! I can’t take it.” It was torturous. But why? Why is so much of the book flooded with literary listicles?
Rushdie rages against the anti-elitism that poisons America, that made so many of us so stupid as to vote for the Joker when we knew he was corrupt, racist, and rapacious. Is he shoving his cultural literacy in our faces to remind us that the elite are elite because they know things? I don’t think the people who despise intellect and expertise are likely to pick up Rushdie’s books in the first place. I don’t think Rushdie’s readers need a reminder that he is culturally literate. Familiarity with his work is part of being culturally literate, so what’s the point?
It feels like blasphemy to not like Rushdie’s book – especially since I have loved his others so much. It took me nearly ten days to read The Golden House because I constantly had to take a break, not to stop and think about the story, but because I was frustrated by the artifice of the unnamed country and the tedium of the constant cultural references. I wish I had liked it more. Instead, with such disappointment, I feel downright curmudgeonly.
The Golden House will be released September 5th. I received an e-galley in advance from the publisher through NetGalley.
The Golden House at Penguin Random House
Salman Rushdie author site
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/08/20/9780399592805/