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3.6 AVERAGE
3.6 AVERAGE
A father and four sons arrive in America to start a new life. And they are rich of course! They choose new names for their new life: the father chooses the name Nero, and his sons choose the names Petronius (Petya), Lucius Apulius (Apu), and Dionysius (D). The mansion they live in is renamed The Golden House. It is one among many buildings, owned by the elite, that open into a common garden. When Rene, a Belgian film maker and neighbour, gets to know of their arrival, he is fascinated and sees in them the subject for a new movie.
What to love?
- the characters : All are fleshed out characters. All of them are secretive and closed off.
-Vasilisa is perhaps the main female lead (even though there are others). She is cunning, manipulative and seduces even the reader.
-memorable secondary characters
-as the plot unfolds, the masks of the Goldens fall off. We see their deepest secrets and their vulnerable selves.
-sarcasm and wit about America's political situation with Obama and Trump (referred to as 'The Joker'). Also though provoking passages on naunces of society, gender etc.
- the rise and fall of Goldens on a similar vein to the rise and fall of America. Many times Rushdie brings in the epics and the namesakes of the characters as though he is scared the reader might not understand the depth of the mapping he has tried to do. [However this last aspect does not work in favour of the book and seems forced and dull]
-structure = plot +movie script. This was very interesting to read and made the whole book seem like a movie.
What might irk you?
-the pacing : The pacing is totally off. I slogged through the first 25% of the book. But after that it picked up. Again, the last 25% was full of twists and revelations. I would have liked to have a more evenly distributed plot.
-too wordy : I have no idea why Rushdie does this. But he throws random pieces of information at you, often limited to just naming films/philosophical ideas/political dignitaries/movie makers etc which does not aid the character or reader in any way. It makes the reader feel detached from the story and lose interest. Again, this is mostly in the first 25% of the book.
Overall, a nice read if you get through the first one fourth of the novel.
Full review : http://www.thebooksatchel.com/golden-house-salman-rushdie/
Disclaimer : Much thanks to Penguin India for the book and to Flipkart and Penguin India for the ARC. All opinions are my own.
What to love?
- the characters : All are fleshed out characters. All of them are secretive and closed off.
-Vasilisa is perhaps the main female lead (even though there are others). She is cunning, manipulative and seduces even the reader.
-memorable secondary characters
-as the plot unfolds, the masks of the Goldens fall off. We see their deepest secrets and their vulnerable selves.
-sarcasm and wit about America's political situation with Obama and Trump (referred to as 'The Joker'). Also though provoking passages on naunces of society, gender etc.
- the rise and fall of Goldens on a similar vein to the rise and fall of America. Many times Rushdie brings in the epics and the namesakes of the characters as though he is scared the reader might not understand the depth of the mapping he has tried to do. [However this last aspect does not work in favour of the book and seems forced and dull]
-structure = plot +movie script. This was very interesting to read and made the whole book seem like a movie.
What might irk you?
-the pacing : The pacing is totally off. I slogged through the first 25% of the book. But after that it picked up. Again, the last 25% was full of twists and revelations. I would have liked to have a more evenly distributed plot.
-too wordy : I have no idea why Rushdie does this. But he throws random pieces of information at you, often limited to just naming films/philosophical ideas/political dignitaries/movie makers etc which does not aid the character or reader in any way. It makes the reader feel detached from the story and lose interest. Again, this is mostly in the first 25% of the book.
Overall, a nice read if you get through the first one fourth of the novel.
Full review : http://www.thebooksatchel.com/golden-house-salman-rushdie/
Disclaimer : Much thanks to Penguin India for the book and to Flipkart and Penguin India for the ARC. All opinions are my own.
In these our cowardly times, we deny the grandeur of the Universal, and assert and glorify our local Bigotries, and so we cannot agree on much. In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain— hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause— will claim to be great leaders and benefactors, acting in the common good, and calling all who oppose them liars, envious, little people, stupid people, stiffs, and, in a precise reversal of the truth, dishonest and corrupt. We are so divided, so hostile to one another, so driven by sanctimony and scorn, so lost in cynicism, that we call our pomposity idealism, so disenchanted with our rulers, so willing to jeer at the institutions of our state, that the very word goodness has been emptied of meaning and needs, perhaps, to be set aside for a time, like all the other poisoned words, spirituality, for example, final solution, for example, and (at least when applied to skyscrapers and fried potatoes) freedom.
Salman Rushdie’s mid-career novels, the Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury were, in my view, not even close to the standard of his earlier works, and I know several fellow readers rather gave up on him at that point. But, as someone who persisted, Shalimar the Clown was powerful (and remains significantly underappreciated, largely as interest had diminished), The Enchantress of Florence delightful if somewhat whimsical, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights a wonderful story about the power of stories.
I concluded my review of the latter (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1639040228): “but trademark mannerisms aside, Rushdie is one of our finest writers, and the novel also showcases his wonderfully fertile imagination and his exuberant and yet erudite prose.”
Or as the narrator of Golden House puts it:
I offer this brief CV now so that the reader may feel in good hands, the hands of a credible and not inexperienced storyteller, as my narrative acquires what will be increasingly lurid characteristics.
Unfortunately if Shalimar the Clown was a stunning return to form Golden House is a severe relapse. Rushdie is always simultaneously entertaining and frustrating but here the scales, at least for me, tipped the wrong way.
The Golden House contains far too many topics I don’t really care about, but more generally important, ones when Rushdie really has little to add but where he seems to have felt obliged, by his (deserved) status as a Great Novelist to opine.
In terms of where I had little interest, Rushdie very effectively uses the Rear Window-esque device of having his narrator, René Unterlinden, being something of a voyeur into the lives of the family of Nero Golden. He then takes a meta-fictional approach, where René is himself writing a fictionalised version on what he sees: except Rushdie decided it would be more effective / original to have René be making a film rather than a book:
As the narrator says, it’s an interesting attempt to maybe mix up the genres, be a little genrequeer (that word the first sign of Rushdie foraying into areas he would have been better leaving alone) but it means that while literary references are certainly present, the novel is really aimed more at film buffs than book fans, with the narrative dominated by recollections and reflections of movie scenes (almost none of which I have seen).
This also feels like an attempt to write that mythical thing Great American Novel (or at least The Great New York Novel) – but I’m not sure I’d want to read it even if it did exist. One of Rushdie’s key points is how the events around Trump’s election had led to an America torn in half, its defining myth of a city-on-a-hill exceptionalism lying trampled in the gutters of bigotry and racial and male supremacism, but that myth needed little trampling outside of the country.
And indeed this seems more to The Great A Very Small Part of New York Novel, the book dedicated to the people who introduced him to a particularly exclusive piece of New York real estate, the Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens Historic District (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/fashion/new-york-secret-garden-anna-wintour-bob-dylan.html?_r=0) – I’m sure the detailed descriptions are highly fascinating to the 50 or so people that live there.
As for topics, where Rushdie has nothing to add, for no particularly apparent reason, the novel features, purely in the background and of little relevance to the real story, the appearance of a caricature of Donald Trump, a property tycoon cum liberal-baiting Presidential candidate:
Gary “Green” Gwynplaine, a vulgarian whose name Nero could not bring himself to speak, and who liked to call himself the Joker on account of having been born with inexplicably lime-green hair. Purple-coated, white-skinned, red-lipped, Gwynplaine made himself the mirror image of the notorious cartoon villain and seemed to revel in the likeness.
Albeit one does wonder whether this book was read as research in North Korea as at one point an ageing and increasingly mentally impotent character (albeit not the Joker) lets out as "impotent dotard's shriek"!
And Rushdie’s foray into identity politics ( “What is it? All this language stuff. The 73 pronouns, all of that. I’m a writer, I should know this” – see https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/02/salman-rushdie-interview) is as ill-advised as Ian McEwan’s in Nutshell, another author who I suspect felt obliged by his status to enter the fray.
The shame is that all of this rather overshadows the underlying story of Nero Golden and his family, which presents the immigrant experience into New York:
And the parts of the novel that tell Nero Golden’s back story, taking in the Mumbai underworld and the Nov 26 2008 and Mar 12 1993 terrorism attacks, was fascinating, with Rushdie demonstrating his tight control over his revelations (Patience. I will not reveal all my secrets at once).
The story contains Rushdie’s trade-mark blend of fantasy and realism: the narrator notes early on that in Roman times (from which Nero Golden takes his assumed name), a golden story “was a figure of speech that denoted a tall tale, a wild conceit, something that was obviously untrue.”
Indeed it is almost a relief to see Rushdie’s signature touches, such as his delight in naming characters:
There was a man called Don Corleone. No, of course that wasn't his name, but his name will mean nothing to you. Even the name he actually uses wasn't his name either. A name is nothing, it's a handle, as they say here, just a way of opening a door. 'Don Corleone' gives you an idea of the kind of man he was.
Or per the authorial interview in The Hindu:
He even throws in stereotypical dialogue: the narrator’s Belgian parents speak with cod Belgian accents ("a world vissout mystery iss like a picture vis no shadows ... it shows you nossing") and have a shrine to Eddy Merckx, Magritte and Audrey Hepburn (an excuse for Rushdie to instruct us that she was born Edda van Heemstra), and our Australian tension coach speaks in strine (except Rushdie seems to have got confused with South African "Virry well, thanks. I had ivry confidence")
But by the novel’s end I felt rather like the narrator who, at one point, overwhelmed by the story declares:
All I wanted to do was put my fingers in my ears and shout la la la la la.
And yet, when his next novel comes out, I will be first in the queue to buy it.
Salman Rushdie’s mid-career novels, the Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury were, in my view, not even close to the standard of his earlier works, and I know several fellow readers rather gave up on him at that point. But, as someone who persisted, Shalimar the Clown was powerful (and remains significantly underappreciated, largely as interest had diminished), The Enchantress of Florence delightful if somewhat whimsical, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights a wonderful story about the power of stories.
I concluded my review of the latter (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1639040228): “but trademark mannerisms aside, Rushdie is one of our finest writers, and the novel also showcases his wonderfully fertile imagination and his exuberant and yet erudite prose.”
Or as the narrator of Golden House puts it:
I offer this brief CV now so that the reader may feel in good hands, the hands of a credible and not inexperienced storyteller, as my narrative acquires what will be increasingly lurid characteristics.
Unfortunately if Shalimar the Clown was a stunning return to form Golden House is a severe relapse. Rushdie is always simultaneously entertaining and frustrating but here the scales, at least for me, tipped the wrong way.
The Golden House contains far too many topics I don’t really care about, but more generally important, ones when Rushdie really has little to add but where he seems to have felt obliged, by his (deserved) status as a Great Novelist to opine.
In terms of where I had little interest, Rushdie very effectively uses the Rear Window-esque device of having his narrator, René Unterlinden, being something of a voyeur into the lives of the family of Nero Golden. He then takes a meta-fictional approach, where René is himself writing a fictionalised version on what he sees: except Rushdie decided it would be more effective / original to have René be making a film rather than a book:
For a while I went along with [him being a writer] and suddenly I woke up and thought that’s a terrible idea. It would be better for him to be anything else — a dentist, an accountant, anything, so I thought, okay, he’s not a writer, so what is he? And the minute the idea that he was a filmmaker showed up it actually released something in the writing of the book.(see http://www.thehindu.com/books/interview-with-salman-rushdie-on-the-golden-house/article19600953.ece).
As the narrator says, it’s an interesting attempt to maybe mix up the genres, be a little genrequeer (that word the first sign of Rushdie foraying into areas he would have been better leaving alone) but it means that while literary references are certainly present, the novel is really aimed more at film buffs than book fans, with the narrative dominated by recollections and reflections of movie scenes (almost none of which I have seen).
This also feels like an attempt to write that mythical thing Great American Novel (or at least The Great New York Novel) – but I’m not sure I’d want to read it even if it did exist. One of Rushdie’s key points is how the events around Trump’s election had led to an America torn in half, its defining myth of a city-on-a-hill exceptionalism lying trampled in the gutters of bigotry and racial and male supremacism, but that myth needed little trampling outside of the country.
And indeed this seems more to The Great A Very Small Part of New York Novel, the book dedicated to the people who introduced him to a particularly exclusive piece of New York real estate, the Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens Historic District (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/fashion/new-york-secret-garden-anna-wintour-bob-dylan.html?_r=0) – I’m sure the detailed descriptions are highly fascinating to the 50 or so people that live there.
As for topics, where Rushdie has nothing to add, for no particularly apparent reason, the novel features, purely in the background and of little relevance to the real story, the appearance of a caricature of Donald Trump, a property tycoon cum liberal-baiting Presidential candidate:
Gary “Green” Gwynplaine, a vulgarian whose name Nero could not bring himself to speak, and who liked to call himself the Joker on account of having been born with inexplicably lime-green hair. Purple-coated, white-skinned, red-lipped, Gwynplaine made himself the mirror image of the notorious cartoon villain and seemed to revel in the likeness.
Albeit one does wonder whether this book was read as research in North Korea as at one point an ageing and increasingly mentally impotent character (albeit not the Joker) lets out as "impotent dotard's shriek"!
And Rushdie’s foray into identity politics ( “What is it? All this language stuff. The 73 pronouns, all of that. I’m a writer, I should know this” – see https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/02/salman-rushdie-interview) is as ill-advised as Ian McEwan’s in Nutshell, another author who I suspect felt obliged by his status to enter the fray.
The shame is that all of this rather overshadows the underlying story of Nero Golden and his family, which presents the immigrant experience into New York:
People who are born-and-raised New Yorkers are very proud of the fact. And rightly so. That’s the kind of New York novel that is not mine to write. But I know that most of us who live here were not born here. So much of the story of New York is the story of arrival, the story of people coming from elsewhere, and I thought that’s a story that I can tell. This was a very, very deliberate attempt to write a sort of immigrant novel of New York.https://bookpage.com/interviews/21741-salman-rushdie#.Wc48JmtSxpg
And the parts of the novel that tell Nero Golden’s back story, taking in the Mumbai underworld and the Nov 26 2008 and Mar 12 1993 terrorism attacks, was fascinating, with Rushdie demonstrating his tight control over his revelations (Patience. I will not reveal all my secrets at once).
The story contains Rushdie’s trade-mark blend of fantasy and realism: the narrator notes early on that in Roman times (from which Nero Golden takes his assumed name), a golden story “was a figure of speech that denoted a tall tale, a wild conceit, something that was obviously untrue.”
Indeed it is almost a relief to see Rushdie’s signature touches, such as his delight in naming characters:
There was a man called Don Corleone. No, of course that wasn't his name, but his name will mean nothing to you. Even the name he actually uses wasn't his name either. A name is nothing, it's a handle, as they say here, just a way of opening a door. 'Don Corleone' gives you an idea of the kind of man he was.
Or per the authorial interview in The Hindu:
I love naming. I think it’s something to do with coming from our part of the world, where we think about the meaning of names. We don’t just name children because it’s a name that’s in the family or because we like the sound of it. We give some form to what the name means and what its echoes are. So, I use that same technique for naming fictional characters. The two writers I admire for their naming are Charles Dickens and Saul Bellow. Uriah Heep! You already know who he is before he’s even opened his mouth. You know who he is!And his terrible puns. One incidental character bore more than a passing resemblance to the retired Wimbledon champion Pat Cash. This was the individual charged with the task of rescuing Petya from his fear of open spaces. Petya's hypnotherapist. His name was Murray Lett. 'If you call me, it's not a fault,' he liked to say, a tennis joke that only served (ouch) to increase his resemblance to the former Australian star.
He even throws in stereotypical dialogue: the narrator’s Belgian parents speak with cod Belgian accents ("a world vissout mystery iss like a picture vis no shadows ... it shows you nossing") and have a shrine to Eddy Merckx, Magritte and Audrey Hepburn (an excuse for Rushdie to instruct us that she was born Edda van Heemstra), and our Australian tension coach speaks in strine (except Rushdie seems to have got confused with South African "Virry well, thanks. I had ivry confidence")
But by the novel’s end I felt rather like the narrator who, at one point, overwhelmed by the story declares:
All I wanted to do was put my fingers in my ears and shout la la la la la.
And yet, when his next novel comes out, I will be first in the queue to buy it.
Gender identity and the presidency of a dotard (yes, Rushdie writes dotard).
Well, this was one of the more serious books I've read in a while. Overall, I enjoyed it - the characters and the plot were certainly gripping, even if the majority of the characters were ambiguous at their best and totally unlikable at their worst. That being said, Vasilisa is probably my favorite character in this book, although she pursues her goals with a single-minded ruthlessness, or perhaps because of it. And although I kind of wished her to live, I think, that it's fitting that she died in the end as well.
Although I've seen this book described as Rushdie's return to realism, the imagery/metaphor of the presidential candidates as the Joker and Batwoman were at times so evocative or stretched so much that I started taking them at face value and the book dipped into the magical/comic-al world for me. That being said, I think, it works pretty well, for the most part, although at first, I found it a bit jarring next to all the Greek and Indian mythology stuff that features pretty heavily in the book as well. After a while, however, I came to appreciate the mental image the clash of the ancient and modern paints.
My biggest problem with this book is actually how several aspects of its apparent central theme - identity and identity crisis - are explored. Starting this book I didn't know it features the exploration of sexual and gender identities, so when that topic started to become apparent, I was pleasantly surprised, as I didn't expect that in a "mainstream" book such as this. However, quite quickly this exploration became quite a hot mess written by someone who apparently doesn't understand what they're talking about. It's like a boomer did a quick google search and attempted to convey the complex millennial (and other younger generations') philosophy of gender, sexuality and labels, all without really grasping it at all himself. I kinda sense thatRushdie wanted all of the Goldens, except little boy Vespa, to be tragic in their pursuit of their identities, so to speak. This means that D had to spiral into self-destruction while trying to figure out their gender. D is pretty much thrust into the diverse world of gender and sexuality identities, which should be helpful, except that this world is a half-assed caricature of reality and it pissed me off so much. This book straight-up misrepresents/misunderstands certain aspects of the millennial identity philosophy (for the lack of a better word), especially the idea of identity as something that a person just is versus identity as something a person chooses. The apparent message of this book is that the two are mutually exclusive, when, in fact, they are two sides of the same coin, if you will - there is the feelings, understanding of self, behavior, appearance of a person and there are words that a person chooses to speak about and represent those things. There are other things that bothered me in D's character arc but they are smaller or more nebulous so it's difficult to put them into words.
Bottom line is, it appears Rushdie wanted to write an epic book about an American identity crisis, delving into all aspects of it (race, political leanings, gender, sexuality, etc), but he just sort of swept the surface and dressed it up in evocative language, ending up with a bit of a mess, the conclusion of which appears to be thatwe're all people and trying to identify as something destroys you ? I guess? All the murders, Vasilisa's scheming, and Rene's selfish insensitive pursuit of his Golden cinematic masterpiece sure kept me engaged though.
Although I've seen this book described as Rushdie's return to realism, the imagery/metaphor of the presidential candidates as the Joker and Batwoman were at times so evocative or stretched so much that I started taking them at face value and the book dipped into the magical/comic-al world for me. That being said, I think, it works pretty well, for the most part, although at first, I found it a bit jarring next to all the Greek and Indian mythology stuff that features pretty heavily in the book as well. After a while, however, I came to appreciate the mental image the clash of the ancient and modern paints.
My biggest problem with this book is actually how several aspects of its apparent central theme - identity and identity crisis - are explored. Starting this book I didn't know it features the exploration of sexual and gender identities, so when that topic started to become apparent, I was pleasantly surprised, as I didn't expect that in a "mainstream" book such as this. However, quite quickly this exploration became quite a hot mess written by someone who apparently doesn't understand what they're talking about. It's like a boomer did a quick google search and attempted to convey the complex millennial (and other younger generations') philosophy of gender, sexuality and labels, all without really grasping it at all himself. I kinda sense that
Bottom line is, it appears Rushdie wanted to write an epic book about an American identity crisis, delving into all aspects of it (race, political leanings, gender, sexuality, etc), but he just sort of swept the surface and dressed it up in evocative language, ending up with a bit of a mess, the conclusion of which appears to be that
I really wanted to like this novel but I have to be honest: I did not enjoy it at all. It was very difficult to get through and I almost gave up multiple times. It starts off in a very boring way with nothing going on. That doesn't stop the narrator from narrating everything in a very melodramatic way, which serves no purpose whatsoever. I really did not like the narrator at all; his voice tried to hard to mark its importance and there were just too many pop culture references for my liking. It's clear that the author is a master in the art of making connections; his comparisons between the politics in the States and the happenings in the Golden family were apt and brilliant. However, getting to these moments was a challenge and it stopped impressing me after a time because of the way the author presented it. Maybe I'm not intelligent enough to appreciate the nuances and the arguments the author is trying to make ... but at the end of the day, I didn't enjoy reading this story. Overall, this was not the greatest novel I've read.... but I think I will give the author another chance to wow me!
I received this novel as an advanced copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I received this novel as an advanced copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
If I were younger, I would be all over this book. If I were slightly older than that, but still younger, then I would probably sneer at this book’s pretentiousness. As it is, having advanced to the ripe old age of 28, I have now acquired enough wisdom neither to gush nor to sneer but simply to shrug. The Golden House is most definitely Salman Rushdie, but it’s also a little bit different. And perhaps one of the marks of a great writer isn’t just the quality of their books but whether or not they are willing to experiment with their style.
Réne Unterlinden is an aspiring filmmaker. He befriends his neighbours, the Goldens, expatriates from an unknown country. The patriarch, Nero Golden, has an imperial presence that would make politicians squirm, and each of this three sons has their own unique hang-ups and personalities. Réne watches it all, takes it all in, taking notes for his eventual film about this enigmatic family. Unfortunately, he also finds himself drawn into their drama, so that the subject becomes a character in his own story….
The somewhat embarrassingly ingratiating jacket copy calls this Rushdie’s “triumphant return to realism”, but I disagree. The Golden House might not be magical realism (aka fantasy) in the same sense as Midnight’s Children or many of Rushdie’s other novels. However, to label it realism in the strictest sense indicates that the marketing department in charge of this book just missed the point. This book is a mirror to the present-day situation in the United States, and it achieves that through a healthy dose of surrealism. This is a modern-day fairy tale.
The surrealist elements of the story actually work well for me. I almost see this as a Wes Anderson kind of film, with characters who are more caricature than people. Rushdie explicitly sets them up this way, with our narrator dressing them up in pseudonyms and assigning them roles as he plans to turn their stories into a film of his very own. These aren’t people. They’re plot points, and the fact that they are plot points is the point.
Réne is totally an unreliable narrator too. I wonder how much of what we see or hear is made up or embellished. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s unhinged, but I definitely get the impression that Réne, in his retelling of the events to us, has started mixing his film with reality. And, of course, that brings us to the whole postmodern question at the centre of this book: who are people, really, except the stories we tell about ourselves and each other?
Unlike my last foray into Rushdie, with the beautiful-but-redundant Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, The Golden House didn’t leave me feeling like I’ve seen this all before. I admit that the last part of the book really dragged for me: Rushdie spends a lot of time following Réne down these rabbit holes of backstory, and at some point I was just ready to call it quits. Nevertheless, I stuck it out … and it was mostly worth it.
There is some interesting commentary here on how we perceive the lives of others, particularly those we call the rich and powerful. There’s some commentary here on taking responsibility for one’s own actions (see how Réne deals with the situation he creates with Vasilisa). For all of the caricaturization happening, at the end of the day, characters like Nero are the ones who seem most real, most human in this book—perhaps because they are the most flawed. Is Nero Golden a mobster at heart? Or is he an exiled emperor? A disgraced kingpin? A dolorous yet doting father? A jealous husband? Is he all of these things? None of them? Same goes for Vasilisa, or any of Nero’s children, or Réne himself. Each of them is all just a story, packaged and presented to us by Réne, and Rushdie goes out of his way to point this out to us. He draws the reader in and reminds us that characterization is a fragile form of narrative. We see this, too, in the events that play out in the background, the constant references to American politics, to Donald Trump (the Joker) running against Hillary Clinton (Batwoman).
The Golden House feels very topical because of how it was written, but the truth is that this is a story that could be told anywhere, of any time. I suspect it will endure long after the current political climate has faded. I really like how Rushdie experiments in this book, even if there are times when that experiment feels too drawn out or errs towards the side of pretentious.
Réne Unterlinden is an aspiring filmmaker. He befriends his neighbours, the Goldens, expatriates from an unknown country. The patriarch, Nero Golden, has an imperial presence that would make politicians squirm, and each of this three sons has their own unique hang-ups and personalities. Réne watches it all, takes it all in, taking notes for his eventual film about this enigmatic family. Unfortunately, he also finds himself drawn into their drama, so that the subject becomes a character in his own story….
The somewhat embarrassingly ingratiating jacket copy calls this Rushdie’s “triumphant return to realism”, but I disagree. The Golden House might not be magical realism (aka fantasy) in the same sense as Midnight’s Children or many of Rushdie’s other novels. However, to label it realism in the strictest sense indicates that the marketing department in charge of this book just missed the point. This book is a mirror to the present-day situation in the United States, and it achieves that through a healthy dose of surrealism. This is a modern-day fairy tale.
The surrealist elements of the story actually work well for me. I almost see this as a Wes Anderson kind of film, with characters who are more caricature than people. Rushdie explicitly sets them up this way, with our narrator dressing them up in pseudonyms and assigning them roles as he plans to turn their stories into a film of his very own. These aren’t people. They’re plot points, and the fact that they are plot points is the point.
Réne is totally an unreliable narrator too. I wonder how much of what we see or hear is made up or embellished. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s unhinged, but I definitely get the impression that Réne, in his retelling of the events to us, has started mixing his film with reality. And, of course, that brings us to the whole postmodern question at the centre of this book: who are people, really, except the stories we tell about ourselves and each other?
Unlike my last foray into Rushdie, with the beautiful-but-redundant Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, The Golden House didn’t leave me feeling like I’ve seen this all before. I admit that the last part of the book really dragged for me: Rushdie spends a lot of time following Réne down these rabbit holes of backstory, and at some point I was just ready to call it quits. Nevertheless, I stuck it out … and it was mostly worth it.
There is some interesting commentary here on how we perceive the lives of others, particularly those we call the rich and powerful. There’s some commentary here on taking responsibility for one’s own actions (see how Réne deals with the situation he creates with Vasilisa). For all of the caricaturization happening, at the end of the day, characters like Nero are the ones who seem most real, most human in this book—perhaps because they are the most flawed. Is Nero Golden a mobster at heart? Or is he an exiled emperor? A disgraced kingpin? A dolorous yet doting father? A jealous husband? Is he all of these things? None of them? Same goes for Vasilisa, or any of Nero’s children, or Réne himself. Each of them is all just a story, packaged and presented to us by Réne, and Rushdie goes out of his way to point this out to us. He draws the reader in and reminds us that characterization is a fragile form of narrative. We see this, too, in the events that play out in the background, the constant references to American politics, to Donald Trump (the Joker) running against Hillary Clinton (Batwoman).
The Golden House feels very topical because of how it was written, but the truth is that this is a story that could be told anywhere, of any time. I suspect it will endure long after the current political climate has faded. I really like how Rushdie experiments in this book, even if there are times when that experiment feels too drawn out or errs towards the side of pretentious.
Not what I expected, but grown up Gossip Girl times Reader, I'm an Author enough to be enticing: https://recenseernogeenkeer.com/2018/05/29/the-golden-house/
if i could go back in time and tell myself not to read this i would. waste of time. preachy. boring. the moments of genuinely good writing aren't worth it. this is the kind of satire where it's genuinely confusing whose opinions you're supposed to mock and who you're supposed to agree with. the narrator was one of the most unlikable i've encountered in a long time -- and that's a really dire statement considering the books i've read recently. i had trouble engaging with the story because i didn't care about him at all. in general my feeling toward this book was, "why should i care?" an attempt was made to say something profound and comforting about the current state of america and the world at large (I THINK?) but coming from a shallow, privileged dickhead who's spent his entire life in the same upper crust neighbourhood in new york it comes off as completely disingenuous. there were whole pages where i checked out because i really, seriously don't care real estate laws in india. on top of everything else, there is some very clumsy handling of trans issues. so my rating for this book is really a "yikes"