My first (proper) Rushdie. Of course I had tried to read his other famous works before but the age and stage I was in weren’t conducive to reading his prose. So I left it (both midnights children and satanic verses) alone for the time being and picked up his latest hoping that it’d be a relatively easier read.

Whether I’m in the age and stage for Rushdie yet, I don’t know but The Golden House was relatively easy to read. I thoroughly enjoyed the prose although it felt like I couldn’t decouple the narrators voice from Rushdie’s. The novel is BAROQUE, in one word, chock full of film references and references to stories and art from various cultures. This is how it must feel like being inside a part of Rushdie’s brain. For us, it can be overdrive; for him probably nbd.

So don’t read this if you want something light and breezy. If you’re a lover of cinema, this might be a delight!

PS: all the New York and Bombay settings are absolute joy

I think it’s more like 3,5/5 for me, it was a good read, brilliant sometimes but it was also too long and boring sometimes...

This novel focuses on the Golden family, a very secretive, very wealthy family living in the most lavish mansion in an exclusive enclave in New York City. Initially little is known about the members of the family. They do not speak about where they came from, and their names are inventions; the patriarch calls himself Nero Golden and his three sons have names from Roman history and mythology. One of their neighbours is René, a young, aspiring film-maker. René decides the mysterious family would be a perfect subject for a film so he befriends them to learn their secrets; he ends up being more involved than he anticipated as he records their rise and fall.

Characterization is definitely a strong element. There are many characters but there is no difficulty differentiating them. Each emerges as a unique individual with his/her distinct personality traits, strengths and weaknesses, and interests. Petya, the eldest son, is the intelligent, agoraphobic, alcoholic with Asperger’s Syndrome; Apu, the middle son, is a gifted but attention-seeking artist; and D, the youngest, struggles with his identity. The siren Vasilisa who seduces the much older Nero is one of the most memorable characters; her ruthlessness and amorality match those of her powerful husband and make her one “among the all-time pantheon of designing women.”

René, the narrator, is not a likeable character. He inserts himself within the family and shamelessly uses their confidences for his own purposes. He is a self-centred voyeur waiting for disaster to befall people who treat him kindly. He also proves himself to be such a weak person. Fortunately, he shows some maturity at the end of the novel.

Though the novel is clearly set in the eight years of Obama’s presidency, I at first thought of Nero as a parallel to Donald Trump. He is deeply involved in the construction and development business so the word “GOLDEN, a golden word, colored gold, in brightly illuminated gold neon, and all in capital letters of gold, began to be seen.” This is certainly reminiscent of Trump Tower and Trump’s penchant for gold in his Trump Tower home and the Oval Office. Nero believes that “the only virtue worth caring about was loyalty” and that mirrors the president who dismisses those who are not first and foremost loyal to him. As Nero’s story of his corrupt rise to power emerges, there are obvious parallels with the rise of Trump. Nero’s marriage to a much younger Russian model is similar to Trump’s marriage to the much younger model born in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. What about Vespa and Barron?

Then Rushdie mentions, “The Joker was on TV, announcing a run for president.” There is no doubt who the Joker is: “In Gotham we knew who the Joker was, and wanted nothing to do with him, or the daughter he lusted after, or the daughter he never mentioned, or the sons who murdered elephants and leopards for sport.” The presidential election “became a contest between the Batwoman and the Joker – Batwoman, who owned her dark side, but used it to fight for good, justice, and the American way.” The descriptions of the Joker are many and scathing so there is no ambiguity about Rushdie’s feelings about the current president. Sometimes, the book seems almost prophetic. As I write this review, the news is full of the investigations into Trump’s ties to Russian businesses and Trump’s unwillingness to denounce white supremacists, so reading references to “Russian oligarchs propping up the Joker’s shady enterprises” and descriptions of the Joker’s skin as “white as a Klansman’s hood” is chilling.

The book asks a number of questions and examines a number of issues. It asks whether it is possible for a person to totally reinvent him/herself? Is it possible to escape one’s past? Can a person be simultaneously good and bad? It discusses how difficult it is to find the truth. Several times it is repeated that truth lies beneath a veneer, that “the truth often lies below the surface,” and that “so much is hidden, now that we live in surfaces, in presentations and falsifications of ourselves, the seeker after truth must pick up his shovel, break the surface and look for the blood beneath.” Rushdie suggests that people lie more often than they tell the truth: “These are the times we live in, in which men hide their truths, perhaps even from themselves, and live in lies.” A character says, “’True is such a twentieth-century concept. The question is, can I get you to believe it, can I get it repeated enough times to make it as good as true.’” When René is not privy to an event, he imagines it and passes on his fiction as a truth, so sometimes it becomes difficult to remember what is reality and what is one of René’s fictions. He often uses the phrase “to tell the truth” to reassure the reader that he isn’t lying so the reader wonders whether at other times the narrator is lying. At one point he admits, “I’m also finishing up my Golden screenplay, my fiction about these men who made fictions of themselves, and the two are blurring into each other until I’m not sure anymore what’s real and what I made up.” Using René, a man whose career is based on the use of fiction, as an unreliable narrator is an ingenious way to emphasize the difficulty to getting to the truth.

Gender identity is also explored, primarily through the struggles of D. The reader, like D, may have to think of gender identity in a new way. Are you gay or straight and cis or trans? D is told, “MTF was male to female, FTM was vice versa. Now she was pouring words over him, gender fluid, bigender, agender, trans with an asterisk: trans*, the difference between woman and female, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, nonbinary, and, from Native American culture, two-spirit.’”

The style of the book would undoubtedly be called “elitist” by some. I agree with the narrator who says, “Americans tell you that knowing things is élitist and they hate élites, and all you have ever had is your mind and you were brought up to believe in the loveliness of knowledge, not the knowledge-is-power nonsense but knowledge is beauty, and then all of that, education, art, music, film, becomes a reason for being loathed.” This sounds like Rushdie’s defense of his intellectual writing style for the book is full of allusions to literature, both ancient and modern, and to cinema. René has an encyclopedic knowledge of films and film-makers and I don’t, so I know I missed a lot; I just didn’t have the time to research all of the references.

Besides feeling somewhat intimidated by the number of cinematic allusions, I sometimes became irritated by the number of rambling tangents. The paucity of dialogue and the lengthy sentences do not make his style accessible. Here’s one sentence that is rather overwhelming: “The person credited with making this profound change in Zamzama’s world view and range of interests was a demagogic preacher named Rahman, founder and secretary of a militant organization based in the city and calling itself the Azhar Academy, dedicated to promoting the thought of a nineteenth-century Indian firebrand, Imam Azhar of Bareilly, the town which gave its name to the Barelvi sect of which the preacher Rahman was the leading light.” Another element of the style that bothered me is the excessive foreshadowing of impending doom with statements like “by the time I’m done, much will be said, much of it horrifying” and “I could have prevented what followed if I had been more vigilant” and “Maybe I could have prevented what happened.”

This novel is very broad in scope. At one point René talks about the type of film he would like to make: “a mighty film, or a Dekalog-style sequence of films, dealing with migration, transformation, fear, danger, rationalism, romanticism, sexual change, the city, cowardice, and courage; nothing less than a panoramic portrait of my times.” All of these subjects are in the novel and there are more besides: gun violence, political corruption in the U.S. and India, mental illness, etc.

The book is well worth reading. It will not be a comfortable fit for everyone, but anyone who likes an erudite book that compels him/her to think and enjoys social, political and cultural commentary will love it. In addition, there is a plot with mystery and strong characterization. Though the book has some stylistic excesses, it has so much to recommend it.

Note: I received an eARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).

My man Salman never disappoints. He’s so good at weaving political and social commentary into his novels. This was an epic story told from the perspective of a lucky/unlucky boy whose narrative voice I found to be very endearing in the face of calamity.

I got an ARC from NetGalley and Random House a couple of months ago, for which I am very grateful, but I hadn't gotten around to being in the right mood to tackle a Salman Rushdie novel.

At about 400 pages, I would call The Golden House a sweeping tragedy, spanning the entirety of the Obama presidency as well as covering flashbacks from decades before. At the heart of the novel, which is possibly the most post-truth-y work of fiction currently on the market, is the self-styled Golden family. The patriarch, Nero, and his three sons, Petya, Apu, and D have recreated themselves upon their move to America. They arrive in 2008 in the great New York City, which allows them the anonymity that comes with big cities. Our guide into their mysterious lives is their new neighbor, a young man who we may call Rene.

"The family with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets is the source of all our discontents."

Through Rene's eyes we discover the secrets that made this family run away from the city which they never name and the secrets that they continue to harbor and nurture even while in New York. But much like in real life, secrets have a way of finding their way to the surface. In this case, with tragic consequences.

The events, mostly, are self-brought by the patriarch, which makes for a much more compelling story and tragedy than if they were spurious. Trying to guess and discover the various mysteries kept me turning the pages.

At the center of the novel's themes is that of identity. What is identity? Is it narrowly defined? Do we need to define it? Is there just one identity? Can we make our own identity and if so, what is real? What is truth? These are all pertinent questions for our day and age, drawn very much from the current political climate. In a world of fake news, what is reality? As Rushdie writes: "The question is, can I lie better than the truth?"

Despite what other reviewers have said, I don't think Rushdie has an answer or is trying to push his particular opinion on us. His point is that identity is massive, and maybe we can't never know it completely. He writes as Rene's voice: "We are icebergs. I don't mean that we are cold, only that we are mostly under the surface, and the part of us that is hidden can sink the Titanic."

Some have complained about the heavy political slant of this book, but in this reviewer's humble opinion, fiction is supposed to be informed, inspired by reality. That is what makes fiction so compelling; that we can recognize ourselves, our world, our lives in the words of a fictional story.

Despite the devastating events in the book, one gets the sense that Rushdie is seeking to right wrongs, to create a story where the "bad" guys do get what they deserve in the end, even if relatively innocent bystanders are dragged into the mud too because this is a tragedy. "Look out, you will reap what you sow. You will reap what you sow."

Of course, this is a book of flawed people, the only characters worth reading about, and what was terrifying in reading about such imperfect, morally gray, people was what Rene expressed as a realization that "there was no safe space, that the monster was always at the gates, and a little of the monster was within us too, we were the monsters we had always feared."

There's also some slight hope, both in the ending which I will not spoil, and in the writing. Things don't necessarily have to be the way they've always been, Rushdie seems to say. "It was the way of the world, I thought, and maybe it was, but the world is a bad place, you should look for a better world than the one we have made."

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The prose is beautiful, as you'd expect from an author as acclaimed as Salman Rushdie, the scope of the story is massive yet handled deftly, the plot and characters are compelling, and the story leaves you thinking long after you've finished reading.

I took a star off for pacing, the book could have perhaps been about 30 pages shorter which would have increased the sense of impending doom you get while reading the first part. It took a while setting the stage, introducing the characters, and that made the first part not as readable as the other two, but it was not that big of a problem.

There are many cultural references, both to pop culture and the classics, many of which might require extra research. I would have appreciated some footnotes for that so I didn't have to go into Google to look up a reference I felt I needed to fully grasp a paragraph, which took me out of the book for a moment and made for a less cohesive reading experience.

The juxtaposition of the political, and to a degree the social, unraveling of America with the downward spiral of the Golden family was beautifully done.

Thanks again to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC given to me in exchange for my honest review.

This is my first Rushdie, don't judge. This story is a roller coaster ride of hilarity, death, tragedy, manipulation and deceit. The main character and narrator is a film creator. The book is told through scenes that he has filmed, may film or will never film. (its confusing) I wish i were more a film buff because so much of the book relates to old movies and i struggled with the references.

This is also the story about all aspects of identity, collective and personal. It begins in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama. The book ends with a country grappling with the 2016 election and all that is wrought through the new president, The Joker.

Based on reviews I read, this book is a really toss-up; love it or hate it. I fell somewhere in the middle but am glad that i read it.

3.5 stars

just not enjoying the writing style

I am a terrible person who cannot understand this book and got lost in the long paragraphs that lasted pages ... I felt dumb, so I stopped. Whoops.

This book asked a lot of questions about a post-Trump America, but didn’t answer any of them. That would be okay, except that the asking felt heavy handed and frankly, depressing. This book is rich in symbols and meaning, but I don’t enjoy that when the plot and characters are a dumpster fire of sadness and irredeemable sins.