Thoughts & Review on- "The Golden House" by Salman Rushdie
Thoughts & Review on- The Golden House by Salman Rushdie.
There are times in this novel, when the novel ceases to become a novel, a mere collection of words which when uniformly comes together becomes a character, story or event. The novel becomes a person. It reaches out to grab you, convinces you and manages you to sit at one place & read it completely, devour it, savor it. This is what "The Golden House" does. It consumes you in a good way. You want to grab everyone coming in your way & talk about the literary headiness this novel induces. Unfortunately few understand & we are trapped in our own madness.
We stumble across, fall down, the void left when you complete reading this novel, until you begin another one. Which i as a reader don't want to. I want to badly meet Nero the pseudo Caesar, Vasilisa the Russian wife, Trilogy of Golden sons- Petya, Apu &D, the not so innocent bystander-Rene and i want to visit New York & Bombay again.
The story starts after the dark event of 26/11 in Bombay, where a family of four- a recently widowed father and his 3 sons, leave for America. They not only want to escape their grief- their mother dying in 26/11 massacre at the grand hotel which can't be named, but they also want to escape their old identities and don new names & create new past.
Father maintains himself as the patriarch of the newly formed Golden Family. He names himself as Nero after the last emperor of Caesar Family & his sons are equally christened with the Greek Names of the eldest one-Petronius, Lucius Apuleius & Dionysus. The sons rechristened themselves as Petya, Apu & D.
The Golden Family moves to America, in plush neighborhood called Gardens in New York. The story is narrated in first person by Rene Unterlinden a budding film maker, a confidant of the Goldens and perhaps a reluctant extended family member of Goldens.
There are times, when the story luxuriously moves and studies each character at leisure. As an reader, i was reminded multiple times of Godfather. Salman Rushdie takes the cue too & mentions the Godfather numerous times.
Nero Golden is a man with Midas touch. Everything he touches, transforms into gold. He dips his hands successfully in all the ventures & enterprises & becomes a moghul. The three stars of his life, the undiscovered genius Petya, the socially aware artist Apu & the one in search of his identity D.
We are slowly introduced to their lives, the agony of being genius, suffering from agoraphobia Petya meets an artist called Ubah, he is smitten by her. To help to come out of his agony, his brother Apu helps him to meet her only to betray his brother. The unspoken rage develops a unbreakable wall between the brothers & Petya the agoraphobic once again confines himself to closed spaces of his home & Apu drifts apart too.
The youngest Son D who is already an outcast by sibling status, him being a half brother from a mother who died a destitute's death. His search of his own identity, whether he is a woman trapped inside a man's body agonizes him all the time & becomes his unnameable religion, which he religiously follows and suffers from.
Nero Golden to escape the winter throws a lavish party in Miami, where he meets a former gymnast a beautiful Russian woman named Vasilisa. One thing leds to another, where just a Live-in relationship transforms into marriage, & Vasilisa with her beauty, cunningness & authority controls the whole Golden home.
United in the misgivings for their father's new wife, the brothers except Petya move out. Apu the artist who becomes a highly acclaimed artist & D in transition mode moves in with his Girl friend Riya. We are also introduced to the life of Rene, the life of narrator who comes to love his colleague a intelligent & socially aware film maker-Suchitra Roy.
Rene, the neighbour comes to form a cordial relationship with all of his Golden Men & the Golden wife Vasilisa. His story for the film is revolved around the Goldens & he is obsessed with them in a subtle way. In between, he loses his own parents in a tragic accident & Nero Golden gives him the shelter and emotional warmth he requires.
Its here where an event takes place, which perhaps is the butterfly effect in this novel. An event which perhaps tests, fails and betrays Rene's honesty towards Golden clan. This event perhaps casts a dark but sinister shadow on all of them.
Its here where the family is standing on a pedestal, trying to run away from a past which they so strongly avoided, comes back to haunt them in different ways. Their ways of confronting their pasts, or perhaps the way the pasts deals with them. In the end, its perhaps not the way it seems. Its not straightforward, its a labyrinth of a world within a world of twists and turns.
The confused, puzzled like mind of Petya the oldest son, Apu the man betrayed by his own past, a past which comes to haunt him & D, the youngest of them all cant accept his own identity. The edgy relationship between Nero Golden & his wife Vasilisa, the question of love and morality which largely looms for Rene & his lover Suchitra Roy.
At the end, when you flip the last page of the novel, keep it aside and close your eyes. The feeling is of a person standing on the edge of a cliff, waiting to fall, waiting to dive in, the heaviness sinks in your heart, its your imagined world coming to an end too..for the time being..We'll not the meet Goldens here after. A book closed is a world closed.
Perhaps, what i have written above doesn't do any justice to the novel written by Salman Rushdie. This novel is to be savored. Its only once in a while where you come across a novel, which studies so much in detail for all the characters, their stories, their back stories, the endless historical and mythological references, Bollywood references, everything & everywhere, the conversations between the characters, the high & the low, the rise & the sinking feeling of the characters, the rage, love, happiness, despair so equivocally written, that i longed to meet them, anyone of them. For in this novel, i believe and strongly believe that Salman Rushdie is the man with the midas touch.
He succinctly weaves thread after thread, into intricate patterns, thoughts into actions, actions into consequences. And not one time does his writing feel forced or out of place. The novel spans starts from 2008 & perhaps ends in the present time. But it oscillates effortlessly between both the worlds, real, ethereal, fiction,reality, fantasy.
I have earmarked the whole book at so many places, I am almost tempted to put down the whole book here. Just for the beauty of the language, this book should be taught in literature classes.
For me personally, the book reached its highest ground when this dialogue by Riya Z is mentioned in the book :-
" When i am done with a book, she said, "it is also done with me and moves on. I leave it on a bench in Columbus Park. .......In the beginning I was just giving books away. I got a new book, I Gave away an old one. I always keep just seven. But then i began to find that others were leaving books where i had left mine and i thought these are for me. So now I replinish my library with the random gifts of unknown strangers and I never know what i will read next, I wait for the homeless books to call out; you, reader, you are for me. I do not choose what i read any more. I Am wandering through the discarded stories of the city."
There are so many thoughts over here, Salman Rushdie was a revelation to me. I imagined him to be almost a story teller where we have sat down for a cup of coffee, To me in this book he was like Rene Unterlinden.
"your work goes well when your life's going terribly. Is that a rule ? Loneliness and Heartbreak : These are the names of the gates of Eden."
"This is philosophy.?"
"I need more vodka. The philosophy is in the bottle."
These few lines what i have mentioned is just a drop in the ocean. The whole book, is filled with so many references to books, movies, current global politics, that it take actually an year to read this book, to refer all the references, to ponder over all the characters, to make love to thoughts.
The way the current scenarious are mentioned and sewn together in the book remind me of "The ministry of utmost happiness" by Arundhati Roy.
If reality were a fantasy, then this book would fulfill your every fantasy.
Name of the book- The Golden House- A Novel
Publisher- Penguin-Hamish Hamilton
ISBN- 9780670090297
Genre- Fiction
No.of Pages- 370
Book Source - Flipkart Book Review Programme
You can buy the book from :- Flipkart
PS- While writing & editing this review, i stumbled upon again - 8 Tracks. What a discovery again.
Thank you for reading.
There are times in this novel, when the novel ceases to become a novel, a mere collection of words which when uniformly comes together becomes a character, story or event. The novel becomes a person. It reaches out to grab you, convinces you and manages you to sit at one place & read it completely, devour it, savor it. This is what "The Golden House" does. It consumes you in a good way. You want to grab everyone coming in your way & talk about the literary headiness this novel induces. Unfortunately few understand & we are trapped in our own madness.
We stumble across, fall down, the void left when you complete reading this novel, until you begin another one. Which i as a reader don't want to. I want to badly meet Nero the pseudo Caesar, Vasilisa the Russian wife, Trilogy of Golden sons- Petya, Apu &D, the not so innocent bystander-Rene and i want to visit New York & Bombay again.
The story starts after the dark event of 26/11 in Bombay, where a family of four- a recently widowed father and his 3 sons, leave for America. They not only want to escape their grief- their mother dying in 26/11 massacre at the grand hotel which can't be named, but they also want to escape their old identities and don new names & create new past.
Father maintains himself as the patriarch of the newly formed Golden Family. He names himself as Nero after the last emperor of Caesar Family & his sons are equally christened with the Greek Names of the eldest one-Petronius, Lucius Apuleius & Dionysus. The sons rechristened themselves as Petya, Apu & D.
The Golden Family moves to America, in plush neighborhood called Gardens in New York. The story is narrated in first person by Rene Unterlinden a budding film maker, a confidant of the Goldens and perhaps a reluctant extended family member of Goldens.
There are times, when the story luxuriously moves and studies each character at leisure. As an reader, i was reminded multiple times of Godfather. Salman Rushdie takes the cue too & mentions the Godfather numerous times.
Nero Golden is a man with Midas touch. Everything he touches, transforms into gold. He dips his hands successfully in all the ventures & enterprises & becomes a moghul. The three stars of his life, the undiscovered genius Petya, the socially aware artist Apu & the one in search of his identity D.
We are slowly introduced to their lives, the agony of being genius, suffering from agoraphobia Petya meets an artist called Ubah, he is smitten by her. To help to come out of his agony, his brother Apu helps him to meet her only to betray his brother. The unspoken rage develops a unbreakable wall between the brothers & Petya the agoraphobic once again confines himself to closed spaces of his home & Apu drifts apart too.
The youngest Son D who is already an outcast by sibling status, him being a half brother from a mother who died a destitute's death. His search of his own identity, whether he is a woman trapped inside a man's body agonizes him all the time & becomes his unnameable religion, which he religiously follows and suffers from.
Nero Golden to escape the winter throws a lavish party in Miami, where he meets a former gymnast a beautiful Russian woman named Vasilisa. One thing leds to another, where just a Live-in relationship transforms into marriage, & Vasilisa with her beauty, cunningness & authority controls the whole Golden home.
United in the misgivings for their father's new wife, the brothers except Petya move out. Apu the artist who becomes a highly acclaimed artist & D in transition mode moves in with his Girl friend Riya. We are also introduced to the life of Rene, the life of narrator who comes to love his colleague a intelligent & socially aware film maker-Suchitra Roy.
Rene, the neighbour comes to form a cordial relationship with all of his Golden Men & the Golden wife Vasilisa. His story for the film is revolved around the Goldens & he is obsessed with them in a subtle way. In between, he loses his own parents in a tragic accident & Nero Golden gives him the shelter and emotional warmth he requires.
Its here where an event takes place, which perhaps is the butterfly effect in this novel. An event which perhaps tests, fails and betrays Rene's honesty towards Golden clan. This event perhaps casts a dark but sinister shadow on all of them.
Its here where the family is standing on a pedestal, trying to run away from a past which they so strongly avoided, comes back to haunt them in different ways. Their ways of confronting their pasts, or perhaps the way the pasts deals with them. In the end, its perhaps not the way it seems. Its not straightforward, its a labyrinth of a world within a world of twists and turns.
The confused, puzzled like mind of Petya the oldest son, Apu the man betrayed by his own past, a past which comes to haunt him & D, the youngest of them all cant accept his own identity. The edgy relationship between Nero Golden & his wife Vasilisa, the question of love and morality which largely looms for Rene & his lover Suchitra Roy.
At the end, when you flip the last page of the novel, keep it aside and close your eyes. The feeling is of a person standing on the edge of a cliff, waiting to fall, waiting to dive in, the heaviness sinks in your heart, its your imagined world coming to an end too..for the time being..We'll not the meet Goldens here after. A book closed is a world closed.
Perhaps, what i have written above doesn't do any justice to the novel written by Salman Rushdie. This novel is to be savored. Its only once in a while where you come across a novel, which studies so much in detail for all the characters, their stories, their back stories, the endless historical and mythological references, Bollywood references, everything & everywhere, the conversations between the characters, the high & the low, the rise & the sinking feeling of the characters, the rage, love, happiness, despair so equivocally written, that i longed to meet them, anyone of them. For in this novel, i believe and strongly believe that Salman Rushdie is the man with the midas touch.
He succinctly weaves thread after thread, into intricate patterns, thoughts into actions, actions into consequences. And not one time does his writing feel forced or out of place. The novel spans starts from 2008 & perhaps ends in the present time. But it oscillates effortlessly between both the worlds, real, ethereal, fiction,reality, fantasy.
I have earmarked the whole book at so many places, I am almost tempted to put down the whole book here. Just for the beauty of the language, this book should be taught in literature classes.
For me personally, the book reached its highest ground when this dialogue by Riya Z is mentioned in the book :-
" When i am done with a book, she said, "it is also done with me and moves on. I leave it on a bench in Columbus Park. .......In the beginning I was just giving books away. I got a new book, I Gave away an old one. I always keep just seven. But then i began to find that others were leaving books where i had left mine and i thought these are for me. So now I replinish my library with the random gifts of unknown strangers and I never know what i will read next, I wait for the homeless books to call out; you, reader, you are for me. I do not choose what i read any more. I Am wandering through the discarded stories of the city."
There are so many thoughts over here, Salman Rushdie was a revelation to me. I imagined him to be almost a story teller where we have sat down for a cup of coffee, To me in this book he was like Rene Unterlinden.
"your work goes well when your life's going terribly. Is that a rule ? Loneliness and Heartbreak : These are the names of the gates of Eden."
"This is philosophy.?"
"I need more vodka. The philosophy is in the bottle."
These few lines what i have mentioned is just a drop in the ocean. The whole book, is filled with so many references to books, movies, current global politics, that it take actually an year to read this book, to refer all the references, to ponder over all the characters, to make love to thoughts.
The way the current scenarious are mentioned and sewn together in the book remind me of "The ministry of utmost happiness" by Arundhati Roy.
If reality were a fantasy, then this book would fulfill your every fantasy.
Name of the book- The Golden House- A Novel
Publisher- Penguin-Hamish Hamilton
ISBN- 9780670090297
Genre- Fiction
No.of Pages- 370
Book Source - Flipkart Book Review Programme
You can buy the book from :- Flipkart
PS- While writing & editing this review, i stumbled upon again - 8 Tracks. What a discovery again.
Thank you for reading.
Comments
Post a Comment