Golden House

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Golden House (English title: The Golden House ) is a novel of the writer Salman Rushdie from the year 2017. He is the head of a Indian criminal clans and his three sons, who in the United States to emigrate and there a life in the spirit of ancient Rome lead . In a minor character in the novel, the Joker , Rushdie satirizes the American President Donald Trump .

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Houses in the MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens Historic District in Greenwich Village , Manhattan

On the day of Barack Obama's inauguration as American President in January 2009, the 70-year-old patriarch of an Indian clan involved in organized crime settled in New York to escape the threats in his Indian homeland in the American metropolis. He is called Nero Golden after the Roman emperor Nero and moves into a pompous residential building in Greenwich Village , which is henceforth called The Golden House after the Roman Domus Aurea . His three sons also break with their Indian past and take on names from antiquity : The firstborn son is called Petronius, or "Petya" for short, after Titus Petronius , the author of the Satyricon . He has autism and agoraphobia ; in his social isolation he successfully develops game apps . His brother Apuleius , abbreviated "Apu", after the author of the Golden Donkey , became an artist in great demand among women and gallery owners. Her illegitimate, androgynous half-brother Dionysus , called "D", seeks his orientation between man, woman and the variety of other gender identities.

The newcomers involuntarily attract the interest of their neighbors, including the narrator, the son of a Belgian academic couple who calls himself René, as the narrator in Moby Dick Ismael calls himself . The aspiring filmmaker recognizes the material of his life in the Goldens and moves into the Golden house after the death of his parents so that he can study the family up close. The first cracks appeared in this when Apu Petya took away the love of his life, the sculptor Ubah Tuur. Above all, however, Nero's second wife, the ambitious young Russian Vasilisa Arsenyeva, messes up the order in the house, because it soon becomes apparent that old Nero is hopelessly addicted to her and that she is holding the strings in the house with her cool, calculating manner . Finally, she also draws the observer René into the game when she fathered a child with him, whom she attributed to Nero as his heir and who was christened Vespasian , or “Vespa” for short.

Eight years after Nero's arrival in America, the Joker seized power as American President after voters preferred his opponent Batwoman to the ever-grinning and bullying super villain with green hair . Not only America is threatened with an uncertain future, the Golden House is also heading towards its downfall. Nero's three biological sons died one after the other. Apu, who visits his Indian homeland at Ubah Tuur's side, is murdered by his father's vengeful business associates. Petya is gunned down by a gunman wearing a clown mask. D desperately feels that he does not belong to any of the many identities on offer and kills himself. Finally the Golden house burns down with Nero and his wife. Only little Vespasian survived falling out of a window like a miracle. Nero, aware of his wife's deception, has appointed René as his guardian in the event of his death, and so the heir to Golden's fortune is raised by the filmmaker and his girlfriend Suchita Roy, who forgives him for the affair. He ends his film with a shot in which all the characters are blurred and only the swirling life remains.

reception

Donald Trump as the Joker (pictured by Jack Nicholson) Donald Trump as the Joker (pictured by Jack Nicholson)
Donald Trump as the Joker (pictured by Jack Nicholson )

The novel Golden House by Salman Rushdie, who has lived in New York for 17 years, was read in his adopted country primarily as a “political contribution to the debate” on Donald Trump's America and welcomed as the “first literary counter-attack by the shocked cultural elite”. For Ronald Düker, however, it is also “the bombastic novel of a gifted narrator who has been washed with all the waters of magical realism ”, which raises the questions of Greek tragedy anew: “Can an escape ever succeed? How inexorable is fate, how free is man? ”Angela Schader also sees in the family history of the Goldens“ the force and fatefulness of a classic tragedy, which was inspired by the Atrids as well as Shakespeare and a number of personalities from Roman history ” if he doesn't quite fulfill his “ambitious concept” in the end, despite strong characters. Trump, on the other hand, does not allow Rushdie the honor of a major tragedy and only lets him appear on a side stage from "orange to green".

For Jan Wiele, the main attraction of the novel lies in the “poet's narrator”, who is on the one hand part of the plot and on the other hand often only conveys it to the reader through literary and film-historical allusions. The fictionality of reality is "clearly inscribed in the novel as the main theme ", Rushdie takes postmodern narration to the extreme with current references to fake news and post-factual politics , although he sometimes exaggerates the literary allusions and name dropping. Burkhard Müller therefore reads “a kind of making-of, an appendix rich in anecdotes for the fans”, whose “a hundred thousand cross references [...] prove an exquisite taste”, but also rob the novel of its tension and independence. Jan Küveler sees Rushdie "in total Tourette mode [...] all of his seventy-year-old scholarly and complacency" pouring over the reader, which at least reads as well "as with other top stylists of the American language", namely Vladimir Nabokov and Truman Capote . Anne Haeming is happy about the unreliable chronicler and his "self-referential film script-with-notebook". An “emotional closeness” to the characters is missing, perhaps because love in a world of imploding identities “has to do superhuman things”.

For Shirin Sojitrawalla, “Times of Transition, Metamorphoses” and the “Age of Identity” are the focus of Rushdie's novel: “Who am I and who decides about it?” Golden House is gangster story, family novel , love story and ghost story at the same time American politics is exposed. Rushdie's “lush, mocking, ironic storytelling” mixes “countries, types of text, frames of reference, attitudes [...] until reality and fantasy, book and world can no longer be separated.” The result is “operatic realism” according to the motto “bigger than life ". Arno Widmann admires “the sovereign lightness” of Rushdie, which infects the reader with his “pleasure in thinking and counter-thinking”: “He loses his fear of the unknown, of the incomprehensible. He learns to sing from him, possibly to dance, even if he doesn't understand it. " Golden House ends with a philosophically substantiated" hope that evil will not prevail in the long run ". And even if Widmann does not share this hope, for him the book shows as a “courage-maker” “that even the worst can be told” and thus arouses “in the reader something like love for this terrible, murderous world”.

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Ronald Düker: Nobody escapes fate . In: The time of October 8, 2017.
  2. Angela Schader: Trump plays on the side stage . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from September 5, 2017.
  3. Jan Wiele: Here is Wahnfried, the Purgatorium ( memento from September 24, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of September 5, 2017.
  4. Burkhard Müller : “He could order your execution at any moment” . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of September 4, 2017.
  5. Jan Küveler: When Trump becomes a green blown joker . In: Die Welt from September 8, 2017.
  6. ^ Anne Haeming: Post factual in the community garden . In: Der Spiegel from September 6, 2017.
  7. Shirin Sojitrawalla: Signals from a dark world . In: the daily newspaper of 10 September 2017.
  8. Arno Widmann : Love for a terrible world . In: Frankfurter Rundschau from September 5, 2017.