Book review: The Golden House by Salman Rushdie

This is more a brief take than review of the book. 

The Golden House by Salman Rushdie. Penguin/Hamish Hamilton

I don`t know what to make of this book, I really don`t.

After Arundhati Roy offloaded her somewhat chaotic treasure chest on the unsuspecting reader a short while ago, Salman Rushdie follows in her footsteps, much as he would hate this yoking together, and offloads  a decidedly inchoate box of itsy-bitsy stories rather painfully  braided into a larger story.

I know, I know. Comparisons are odious but. Both the Ministry of Utmost Happiness and The Golden House have far more characters drifting in and out than the story can or does justice to. Both books have long monologues, the kind of droning on and on that Ayn Rand used to get stick for. The coincidences are contrived, the plot is driven forward on the most predictable of paths, the constructs are artificial and alas and alack, there is not an iota of magic in either of the tales.

The Golden House tells us about the mysterious Nero Golden ( a powerful man `deeply in love with the idea of himself as powerful`) who arrives one day rather in the manner of Jay Gatsby and occupies his opulent mansion with his three mysterious sons. Who is Nero, why is he here, where has he come from, what will become of him? Worry not, the book tells all, but in such a disjointed, disconnected , shooting off here and there fashion, that the reader retains verily the mildest of interest in the Golden family.

What`s worse, the narrator who goes by the unlikely name of Rene Unterlinden,  doesn’t  quite find his voice and remains just that, a somewhat lame narrator. There is a part where he talks of a bag of soiled clothing left on Nero Golden`s doorstep, a bag which mystifies the  Western inmates of the house. Then Rene goes on to tell the reader that the bag contained Indian clothing: kurtas, pyjamas, lehngas, veshtis, sari blouses, petticoats. I would have liked to ask just how Rene came by this knowledge but by then I’d lost interest in Rene.

Fun fact: on page 345, Nero is unkindly, even cruelly, described as a dotard. I`m presuming Rushdie wrote this well before Kim Jong-un  called the 45^th President of the United States just that, a dotard. Does that mean great minds think alike? Or that Kim Jr is a Rushdie fan?

But I have to make this list. Of (some, just some) names, places, animals and things that find fleeting mention in The Golden House:

DH Lawrence

Francois Truffaut

Guadagnini violins

Deborah Harry (Blondie?!)

Rumi

The Benami Transactions (Prohibitions) Act

Mia Farrow

Sicilian godfathers

Mumbai dons

Luis Bunuel

Byron/Don Juan

Princess Margaret

Arthur Schlesinger

Baba  Yaga

Rolex/Vacheron Constantin/Piaget/Audemars Piguet.

Dustin Hoffman

The Spectrum Scam (yes, the Indian one)

The Flatiron District

Mikhail Gorbachev

The Godfather

PG Wodehouse, at least three times.

The Long Island Expressway

The Tribeca Film Festival

Kurosawa

Umrao Jaan

Sanjay Gandhi

Werner Herzog

Pat Cash

Metallica

Lou Reed

Candy Crush Saga

Myanmar

Batman/The Joker

The US elections

Groucho/Chico Marx

Diana Vreeland

Trannies

Seinfeld

The Clinton Oaks Correctional Facility in Jefferson Heights, Minnesota

Helen (of Troy)

La La Land/Manchester by the Sea/Arrival

1. Maugham

An alpine lynx

Winona Ryder

Social media

Rear Window (the film, not a random window)

Qutb Minar

Religion

Shakespeare

Psycho (the film, not a random individual)

A pearl- handled gun

Emma Bovary

Spiderman

One babushka

A dhobi

A gas main…

And a fire.