The Golden House: A Novel by Salman Rushdie (EPUB)

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A modern American epic set against the panorama of contemporary politics and culture—a hurtling, page-turning mystery that is equal parts The Great Gatsby and The Bonfire of the VanitiesONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, PBS, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Financial Times, The Times of India On the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, an enigmatic billionaire from foreign shores takes up residence in the architectural jewel of “the Gardens,” a cloistered community in New York’s Greenwich Village. The neighborhood is a bubble within a bubble, and the residents are immediately intrigued by the eccentric newcomer and his family. Along with his improbable name, untraceable accent, and unmistakable whiff of danger, Nero Golden has brought along his three adult sons: agoraphobic, alcoholic Petya, a brilliant recluse with a tortured mind; Apu, the flamboyant artist, sexually and spiritually omnivorous, famous on twenty blocks; and D, at twenty-two the baby of the family, harboring an explosive secret even from himself. There is no mother, no wife; at least not until Vasilisa, a sleek Russian expat, snags the septuagenarian Nero, becoming the queen to his king—a queen in want of an heir. Our guide to the Goldens’ world is their neighbor René, an ambitious young filmmaker. Researching a movie about the Goldens, he ingratiates himself into their household. Seduced by their mystique, he is inevitably implicated in their quarrels, their infidelities, and, indeed, their crimes. Meanwhile, like a bad joke, a certain comic-book villain embarks upon a crass presidential run that turns New York upside-down. Set against the strange and exuberant backdrop of current American culture and politics, The Golden House also marks Salman Rushdie’s triumphant and exciting return to realism. The result is a modern epic of love and terrorism, loss and reinvention—a powerful, timely story told with the daring and panache that make Salman Rushdie a force of light in our dark new age.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The seller dispatched the chosen book promptly so that I received it earlier than predicted. The hardcover was in excellent condition, just as described in the short ad on the Amazon website.

⭐The author of The Golden House, Salman Rushdie, and I have lived through the same decades, but his life has been global and large; mine provincial and small. Mr. Rushdie was born in Mumbai, however his influences were both British and Indian. Everyone remembers that he lived in fear of his life as a Muslim under a fatwa because of his book, The Satanic Verses.In The Golden House, Rushdie writes as a New Yorker. He tells a tale of a Mumbai family, hiding with new identities, under a mysterious veil of danger in New York City. Our narrator is a young American man raised by professorial and loving parents on the edges of the MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens. (They’re real, look it up.) The Golden family lives at the other end of the Gardens and these recent arrivals are endlessly fascinating to René, the son of Gabe and Darcy.The Goldens were “reborn” when they left Mumbai to live in America with their adopted Roman names. The father claimed the name of Nero, with all its end-of-empire symbolism. His first son took the name Petronius, the second chose Lucius Apuleius (Apu) and the third became Dionysus or D. The names were perhaps a bad idea.René had always wanted to be a film maker but his life seems too prosaic until it becomes entangled in the low key, but rather tragic, lives of this family with no mother and, seemingly, no past. This novel is, among other things, an homage to great movies/films – European, Hollywood, Bollywood. Salman Rushdie, bursting still with crackling intellectual energy pulls into his story references to the movies he has loved, the same movies we love, except for a few so highbrow they may never have been available in the hinterlands I have inhabited. These movies still live vividly in his prodigious memory and in the minds of many a film buff.As the Golden family comes apart, because you really cannot escape the past, a politician known as the Joker, guess who, a clownish grafter, is running for the American Presidency. (The parallels between American Democracy and the fall of Rome are hardly subtle.) As we know the Joker wins the election.This is a very readable novel, without the Muslim/Indian baseline which is foreign to most Americans and makes some Rushdie novels seem somewhat dense. The Golden House is a tour de force by a man who is comfortable in cultures around the globe and does not mind splashing around in his literary bona fides for our enjoyment. Eliot’s “Prufrock” and Shakespeare get cameos among the films – “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Not yet, Mr. Rushdie, not yet.Those of us who are shell-shocked with worry for American Democracy can find some comfort in the decision this British/Indian man made to put on his New York/American persona in order to help us through these chaotic days (and nights, and months, and years). What began as a comedy could easily become a classical tragedy. However, I think you will read this tragedy with a great big old smile on your face (at least some of the time).

⭐There are now so many writers to whom I’ve become such a bingeing devotee that literally when the thought struck me that I hadn’t heard from Salman Rushdie since his last, brilliant modern cover of the Thousand and One Nights (Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights), I suddenly discovered a new novel from him, The Golden House. So now I’m up-to-date with his complete published work, and based on this latest, I’ll only come back after some reader passes benign judgement on work yet to come.Narrated by Rene Unterlinden, a cineaste/wannabe filmmaker, who was brought up in the MacDougal/Bleecker Gardens to which only the residents of the enclosing houses of those Village blocks have access. The big house belongs to the Goldens, tycoon widower with three sons (with a Russian gold-digger wife yet to appear) having made a precipitous and complete abdication from Mumbai. The sons have all chosen new names for their new American personae, taken from Greek and Roman mythology. That at least lessens Rushdie’s normal predelection for cultivating superfluous mythological references, even though he does so here with his usual superb writer’s craft, unfortumately without any of the impetus of passion. Even in his self-adulatory presentation at the Miami Book Fair in support of the book, he admits that he had taken the magical realism, all the genii and spirits in his writing ‘as far as they could go’; though he may have intended a more real, reportage/historical context, and you’ve decided that you’ll proceed without spirits, we still need Spirit. That’s the fault or perhaps, if I’m being generous, the intent behind Rene’s avowed distance, embodied in his quoting of Christopher Isherwood: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking”. Rene amends this for contemporaneity by going so far as to say he’s probably a ‘smartphone camera’, one that does a lot of the thinking and ideation process autonomically. Rene even says, toward the end of the book, that instead of feelings, he references something in a film. Unfortunately, the cinematic references are not so astute, nor illuminating, surprisingly glib and facile. David Cronenberg’s aesthetic ideal of the 12″ floating cube as the best incarnation of the film camera (in itself a sort of bad knockoff of Altman’s ‘floating window’ camera aesthetic) and how to make a story from the exacting and limited and distancing device of Being A Camera, a mere witness. Fact is, Film is the true Gesamptkunstwerk, and it’s not mere witness that makes a film, it’s taking responsibility for every scrap in frame, every sound, every word, the music, the pacing. In Rene we have only the misguided aesthetic of that impersonal remove, that, even if intentional, merely results in a dispassionate tone making it impossible to empathize with this Dickensian cast of burlesque idiosyncracies: the father, Nero, after the last of the Caesars, the eldest son, HFA agoraphobe gamer and game-maker, the middle, artistic son, the youngest with Dionysian (though he prefers only to be referred to as D) gender identity conundrums, the scheming Russian gold-digger. In the end, it’s very hard to care about them, or their portentously presaged downfall. Spoiler alert: Nero fiddles while…It seems clearly intentional, all this distancing, when Rushdie himself seems to peek out from behind the curtain to give a few impassioned pages of outrage and disbelief as The Joker, the cackling green-haired white faced ultra-villain with unfortunate lack of Batman anywhere in sight (as his girlfriend quips “DC takes over D.C.”) enters the Presidential fray. No guesses. But this comes 2/3 into the book, and feels like too little too late, and besides, Keith Olbermann is on this subject far more impassioned and eloquent. And speaking of too little too late, we finally get an overlong history of India’s Underworld, from which the Goldens beat their hasty retreat westward. I guess with all the foreshadowing of the deep dark and tragic secrets we’ve been supposedly salivating for, we just don’t care.Does it really take such a smart man to write such a stupid book?Then again, maybe it’s me: maybe my standards have been raised coming to know in recent months Clarice Lispector, Javier Marias, Michel Houellebecq in their entirety. Reading the latest installment, Volume 5 of Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar was a similarly exhalting experience. Even Keith Olbermann’s Trump Is F-ing Crazy was the kind of reinvigorating read I’d always thought was Rushdie’s metier. Again, I point out his writer’s craft as being unsurpassed: the wielding of words is not what is at issue here with my dismissal of this book’s thorough miscalculation of narrative style and lack of substance, lack of humanity; which I dearly hope is an aberration on his part.

⭐Salman Rushdie is celebrated, alright, but literature it is not. Just compare it to Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence. It is in many ways reminiscent of the Golden House, but the two books are a world apart in literary quality and emotional effect on the reader. While Pamuk never leaves the soul of the narrator, Rushdie seems to never dwell on it. Quite the opposite – he tries to detach himself from the inner world of his hero as if hiding from view makes the story more objective. I would say the reverse is true. If René was fully developed from within – how his own life gives him parallel experience to that of the Goldens – this would have been a major book! And there are many parallels. René builds his own “empire” in the movies, yet he is losing sight of what truly matters – his love Suhjitra. This is patently close to Nero Golden’s world – while building his “empire” he too, loses what matters, his family. Making a strong parallel between the two would have made the book worthwhile. But as it is René is an undeserving hero, who gets the girl and the child, but the book loses its strength. It would have been much more compelling if Suhjitra never forgave him and if the child was given to another family. As it is though, we just got another Hollywood style “Happy End”. Speaking of which, Rushdie’s pretence at writing a movie script or even filming it, is no more than pandering to millennials who reject reading books altogether. Literature demands commitment, old boy.

⭐I hesitated to buy this, as I’d been less than impressed with last offering or two and there are a lot of negative reviews from critics and on here.Finally I was persuaded by a review on here titled “His best since Shalimar the Clown”, I got it and I really enjoyed it. I couldn’t agree more. The prose is so addictive, every sentence is a joy to read, and a very contemporary and up to date setting.It’s maybe a bit less highbrow than you would expect, for example when he uses the term “bardo” he explains what it means, I wonder whether his readers need that kind of handholding. On the other hand I counted at least 4 examples of him quoting Paul Simon lyrics which would go straight over your head if you didn’t know those songs.Ultimately if you are familiar with his previous books, you need the opinion of someone in the same boat to decide whether this one is worth your time. There’s no point paying attention to critics, who are in a world of their own, or first time readers, who might just not like Salman Rushdie’s style in the first place. So take it from me it’s a return to form.

⭐After a poor first half, a dreary chronicle of personal reminiscences and conceits, by which time you begin to imagine the school report reading ‘Salman is capable of much better than this’, Salman Rushdie engages gear, and his peerless literary genius, to deliver a gripping story which is part thriller, part social commentary, part consideration of human vice and virtue.It’s not clear whether it really is autobiographical or simply adopts this genre, but Rushdie succeeds in his declared aim of showing that humanity in general, and any one person in particular, can be both good and bad.His ire is immensely stirred in his outpouring of what is possibly the most literately endowed condemnation of the Trump phenomenon. America has lost its heart, its nature, its dignity, and its soul. It’s doubtful whether his rebuke will reach its target, or be understood if it does, but it’s worth the effort, and galvanises us all.Movingly, Rushdie allows redemptive human love and forgiveness to survive the blasts of evil and vice. We can only hope he’s right.

⭐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.

⭐I thought the subject matter may be interesting..wrong..narratted in the most irritating way imaginable, his voice is jarring. The story is the most boring, smug, patronizing heap of claptrap. I kept listening but it got worse and by disc 5 which I have to eject unfinished.. my one delight will be to dump the lot in the bin…at the cost of 40 quid…live and learn

⭐For me, this was the best Salmon Rushdie book since Midnight’s Children. The story, the image making, the use of metaphors and so much side information make the book a real joy. Rushdie is like a confident performer on a stage showing off his art of language, well worth experiencing.

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