I really wanted to enjoy this book by Salman Rushdie but I just couldn't get into it, despite trying 3 times, it just wasn't for me. I can't review the book properly because I couldn't get beyond 30%, sorry.

Well written novel but I didn't enjoy the plot and just couldn't get into the book. I'm sure other people will enjoy the world Mr Rushdie created

Not what I thought it would be, my first Salman Rushdie book i've heard alot about him but i think it's too much for me

Salman Rushdie has done it again! A great read.
Thank you NetGalley for allowing me to read this book in return for an honest review.

This book just wasn't for me. The story was very much my usual genre, but I just couldn't get into. Ended up reading out of duty rather than enjoyment.

Haven't read and probably won't. Sorry
Haven't read and probably won't. Sorry
Haven't read and probably won't. Sorry

A stunning novel of an ultra-rich family's corruption and shifting identity viewed through the eyes and lens of Rene, their young filmmaker neighbour. It's brilliantly written, an absolute tour de force from Rushdie. Politically relevant and Shakespearean in its family dynamics, this is a hugely powerful novel.

Unfortunately this one wasn't for me. The writing was good, but I just couldn't get into it. I may try again at some point. I don't feel I can give this book any stars as I haven't finished it.

A wonderful if slightly difficult read. A great story but why do gifted authors like Rushdie have to digress on just about every page on all matter of things whose only purpose seems to be to show how clever they are. Will make an epic film in due course I'm sure.

This novel by Salman Rushdie is a present day commentary on America in the build up to Trump and how fact and fiction as well as art and reality collapse into one other. There have been a number of books written in the wake of the shock of Trump and Rushdie’s novel definitely helps shed light upon the situation.

Narrated by René, an aspiring filmmaker, this account feels very similar to the likes of The Great Gatsby, in which everything is rather hyperbolic because it is written from the perspective of an outsider. Following the exceedingly wealthy Golden family, René attempts to figure out the mysterious circumstances of their arrival from India, and the subsequent, often cataclysmic events surrounding them, in which the narrator plays a part. The slow emergence of a dark history of corruption and evil is paralleled by Rushdie's perception of the rise of ignorance, untruth, bigotry and hatred, and of "The Joker" (i.e. Trump, although he is never named).

The writing is brilliant. It is discursive, sometimes addresses the reader directly, even sometimes adopts the form of a screenplay and has a wonderful voice of its own. The context surrounding the Mumbai bombings is intriguing as much of it is based on factual information. The truth is, after all, stranger than fiction.

While the style is not flawless, as the postmodern blurring between supposedly objective narrative and things René has "made up" for his screenplay did get a little haphazard, however, this may be Rushdie's attempt to reflect how "post-truths" are disseminated in a similar fashion. Nonetheless, I thought The Golden House was enjoyable. Even after all these years, Rushdie is able to adapt his writing to suit a modern generation.

I gave this a good go - I haven't read any Salman Rushdie before so I wanted to try and remedy that and thought this would be a good place to start, but unfortunately I just couldn't get into it and in the end I gave up. Probably not the book for me - I'll have to have a go at one of his earlier novels - I did enjoy a radio adaptation of Midnight's Children back in the day.

he Golden House tells the tale of a shifty wealthy family that immigrated to America from India. But the story is not told by a family member but by Rene the wannabe film maker neighbour who is fascinated by them and thinks it would make a great film. His life slowly becomes tangled within theirs as the families secrets from the past are revealed.
Inject that at the time it the inauguration of Barack Obama we lean lot about America, its politics and culture.
It's a modern tale with a big mix of ideas, gender, culture, politics and ethics.
I found it slightly heavy going at times and read it in snippets over weeks but it still engaged me.
A curious book that pulls you in and gets right in to your mind.
My thanks go to to the publishers, author and Netgalley in providing the arc of this book in return for a honest review.

You only have to read half a page and already you find yourself deeply immersed in Rushdie's world. Few authors can create and anchor us in another world, yet make us think back to and evaluate our own, as Rushdie does. As always, it's been a pleasure.

I'm very disappointed that I didn't enjoy this book.

I tried, really I did. I'm usually a fast reader, compelled to consume books as quickly as possible. The length of time this has taken is proof that it did not hold my attention or capture my imagination. In the meantime I've read several other books - all gripping and compelling and inspiring me to seek out other works by their authors - but this is not in that category at all.

So, it's not a book for me - but it might be for other people. That's all I can say.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for allowing me to read this in return for my review.

I never really fell in love with Salman Rushdie, Midnights Children passed me by, The Satanic Verses I found underwhelming and I couldn't understand the outrage or ovation that it received from different quarters. So I started Rushdie's latest The Golden House with little expectation, which meant that I had a very pleasant surprise.

Nero Golden, a wealthy Indian, immigrates to New York from Mumbai with his 3 sons in curious circumstances. As the novel unfolds, the back story in Mumbai becomes clearer while the impending sense of disaster grows. The story switches between the challenges in adapting to New York life faced by Nero's sons, the machinations around Nero himself and what happened in Mumbai. There are strong resonances with recent political events both in the US and India. The climax, while somewhat predictable, is compelling - this is a literary page turner.

If, like me, you haven't read Rushdie for a while The Golden House is well worth giving a try - you might even want to go back to some of those old hits to give them a second read.

This novel by Rushdie is a present day commentary on modern day America in the build up to Trump and how fact and fiction as well as art and reality collapse into one other. There have been a number of books written in the wake of the shock of Trump (this desperate need to make sense of things) and Rushdie’s novel definitely helps shed light (or explain the darkness) upon the situation (for those of us who do not live in America, but are watching with fear from afar). There is no magic realism here but bleak reality rooted in the otherworldly dimension of the economically privileged (Rushdie opens the novel with a quote by François Truffaut “Le vie a beaucoup plus/d’imagination que nous.”) Rushdie exposes us to victims of madmen shootings, Mafia murders and tragic gender crisis situations (our inability to mutate, to change, to immigrate successfully).

This novel about the failure of reinvention has an artificial feel and set up (strangely similar in a way to ‘The Great Gatsby’) where the action and characters centre around the “Gardens,” the narrative is told from Rene (budding script writer/movie maker, transformer of life into artifice) often becoming scripts that build up pace and drama (scenes mostly imagined by the narrator). The importance of movies and art in shaping our consciousness are key themes. The narrative is layered and yet extremely static. The build up and unravelling of the Golden family tale takes its time, we are not even introduced to Rene (the narrator) until Chapter 4. Then the action suddenly picks up and spirals out of control. The narrator/main character slips in and out of the narrative, shaping it, creating it, participating in it. I particularly liked the detail of reinvention: the affluent Goldens take on Roman names which in turn become distorted and shaped to fit them. But the Roman reference really sets the stage for treachery, megalomania, madness, doom, poison and burning cities.

The biblical connotations that the Gardens have are vast (childhood innocence, sibling rivalry, evil entering the Garden – the definition of evil malleable – like anything that attempts to be fixed down/defined/explained in this novel), eventually the fire (Devil) will ensure complete erasure and expulsion. Rushdie has written a novel that encompasses the entire diseased, corrupt, ravaged society we live in its full colour and splendour! He leaves nothing out!

A brilliant, wonderful and (eventually) addictive read!

“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 out 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.”

René is 25 and has lived his whole life in a liberal elite manhattan bubble, growing up in the classically classy aspiring MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens with parents who love him but gently tease each other about their own privilege. He has come of age in the golden years of Obama and now as they are closing his aspiration to make documentaries that will challenge and entertain seems more important than ever.

He wants to do an expose on his neighbours, Nero Golden and his three adult children dropped into the grandest house in the Gardens out of nowhere with assumed names and a past in a city they would not talk about. They arrived just after Obama's inauguration and quickly established themselves at the apex of New York society.

He chronicles the undoing of the house of Golden: the high life of money, of art and fashion, a sibling quarrel, an unexpected metamorphosis, the arrival of a beautiful woman, a tragedy from their homeland and the guilt surrounding it that they can never escape. But through it René moves from impartial observer to pivotal pawn and risks losing everything himself.

There is a lot in this novel, and my abiding impression of it is that it is written by a much younger man than Salman Rushdie. He captures the voice and sensibilities of millennial without condescension or caricature. The book is full of film and pop culture references and with these Rushdie comes close to his signature magic realism, he talks about Donald Trump as the green haired Joker of Gotham City so convincingly I wondered if I'd slipped into a parallel universe!

As it's told from first person there is unavoidably an imbalance between the depth of characterisation of René and the rest of the cast. Still they're an interesting bunch and they're foibles are treated with sensitivity. Nero himself is almost the perfect godfather-in-exile, the ultimate patriarch whose strength and weakness is his family.

the writing is masterful and I enjoyed it from the start to the finish, however it was missing some little something or other so I can't quite give it full marks.

Four Bites

NB I received a free copy of this book through NetGalley in return for an honest review. The BookEaters always write honest reviews.

This  is the second Salman Rushdie book I’ve read, the first being The Satanic Verses, which is probably his most popular book.  

The Golden House tells the story of a powerful and wealthy family that immigrated to America from a (to the reader for the first few chapters of the book unbeknownst) foreign country. It's centered around Nero Golden and his three sons, Petya, Abu and D. The curious thing about it, though, is that it is told not by one of them, but by their new neighbour and wannabe-filmmaker René.

This book was filled with all things American and many relevant topics and issues were addressed; there's a bit about everything, really: from Black Lives Matter and gender questions to wealth and poverty to mental health and illness to terror attacks and gun control - really, everything you ever thought about, it's in this book. In the center of everything, though, is the question of identity.

There are three aspects which make me say that, yes, The Golden House is a highly important novel. The first aspect I have broached already: there are many important issues Salman Rushdie raised and discussed, the insights we got through various characters; this book was filled with tragedy and crisis and at the same time it was a portrait of America as we see it today.

Second, the characters. René, unreliable and honest at the same time, our narrator and our eyes and ears in this book. The Golden family, Nero and his sons, all deeply flawed, all dealing with problems of various kinds. And many others: Riya, Suchitra, Vasilisa - what a wide range of characters Rushdie created in this book! They were all exceptionally written and filled the story with life.

And lastly, of course, Salman Rushdie’s writing. His writing style is different to anything else I’ve ever read. Some sentences take up almost the whole page, and there's a metaphor here and a reference there and it's just like being thrown right into the narrator’s head and hearing his every thought. But I really liked that. It made the whole story seem kind of raw; although I am sure that not one word was added just for the sake of it and everything was very thought-through, it felt different. At times the passages were almost hurried and that’s just what makes Rushdie such a good story-teller: while reading, I felt like I was right there amidst Nero and Petya and Apu and D and René (of course).

Yet, there’s more. Throughout the book, the structure of the writing itself changes: there were times, when novel turned into drama, into screenplay. This, I thought, was especially clever, since the narrator is a filmmaker in spe (or as he calls himself, a “would-be writer of films”).

And still, there is a reason why I, personally, can't give this book five stars. There was such an amount of information, such a huge input of knowledge, it could get confusing at times. Other people might not have this problem, but there were moments when I found myself overwhelmed. There were metaphors I didn't get, references to movies and books I haven't watched or read, and events I hadn't heard of before were talked about at length. As I said before, this is a personal problem and yet I feel like it’d be unfair to give a star more.

To conclude, I can say that, although I had my difficulties with it at times, this book is a very important read. I’m sure that The Golden House will stay with me for a long time. And isn't this what makes a book a good book?

To focus on the positive, I loved the first part of this book. After that, I'm afraid it wasn't my cup of tea.

I found the book to be flat and dull so found it a bit hard going. Finished it and was glad.to be able to get into something else.