{"id":115978,"date":"2017-09-04T23:19:32","date_gmt":"2017-09-05T03:19:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=115978"},"modified":"2017-09-04T23:19:32","modified_gmt":"2017-09-05T03:19:32","slug":"obama-trump-elections-provide-backdrop-for-salman-rushdies-the-golden-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2017\/09\/04\/obama-trump-elections-provide-backdrop-for-salman-rushdies-the-golden-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama, Trump elections provide backdrop for Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Golden House’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"FILE:<\/a>
FILE: Salman Rushdie (Photo by Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

TORONTO \u2014 Salman Rushdie says the idea of setting his latest novel between two historic U.S. elections came to him late, but the contrast between Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s presidencies provided the perfect backdrop for his modern American fable.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew I was going to try to write a fairly contemporary social novel about this particular moment; but to actually have that structure going across those eight years was not there at the beginning,\u201d the celebrated author said in a phone interview from New York.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce I thought of it, I thought: ‘That gives it an interesting arc.’ Unfortunately, given what happened in the election last year, the arc became, in a way, more formally satisfying to go from a moment of great optimism to, in a way, its opposite.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Golden House\u201d (Random House) opens on the day of Obama’s inauguration, where a billionaire and his children arrive in New York. The family heads to the Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens Historic District in Greenwich Village \u2014 or\u201dthe Gardens,\u201d for short \u2014 to live in the former Murray mansion, now rebranded as the Golden House.<\/p>\n

Rushdie said the setting is based on a real-life communal garden where his friends live, and seemed like an ideal environment for the novel’s drama to unfold.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seemed like a stage on which the action could take place. That made me think of (the film) ‘Rear Window’ because everybody could spy on everybody else’s lives,\u201d said Rushdie. \u201cThe fact is, the house on which (Alfred) Hitchcock based ‘Rear Window’ is on Christopher Street, which is like 100 yards away.\u201d<\/p>\n

The patriarch called Nero Golden resides with his three sons: the reclusive Petya, flamboyant artist Apu and the youngest boy, D., who is carrying a deep secret.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think they come to New York to reinvent, not to disappear,\u201d Rushdie said of the mysterious Goldens. \u201cNero Golden in New York is leading a very … business, entrepreneurial life. But they feel \u2014 as it turns out erroneously \u2014 that they can escape their past by coming this far. And the fact that they’re wrong about that is part of the tragedy of the book.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Goldens are seen through the lens of their neighbour, Rene, a budding young filmmaker who insinuates himself in their lives as research for a movie on the family. The novel itself takes on a cinematic quality, complete with the use of scene transitions and other techniques reminiscent of the making of a big-screen epic. It was a storytelling structure that proved freeing for the award-winning Rushdie.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt can slip in and out of screenplay, and it can adopt some of the characteristics of film writing at certain moments for dramatic effect,\u201d said Rushdie. \u201cIt allowed me also to use cinematic references in a way that I haven’t used ever that much before; to use film as a way of proving echoes of the action through which Rene can understand the action.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rushdie said the two areas of \u201cThe Golden House\u201d in which he did the most work was in his exploration of Petya, who is living with high-functioning autism; and the issue of gender involving D, short for Dionysus, a moniker shared with the Greek mythological figure.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe god Dionysus one of his characteristics is to be what would now be called gender-fluid,\u201d said \u201cHe is sometimes referred to as almost hermaphroditic. He is a god who is on that gender boundary, which is why the name seemed right.<\/p>\n

\u201cCertainly here in New York, the subject of gender and the way in which the conversation about gender is fragmented into a conversation about many, many different variations of gender is something that’s new and I found very interesting, and so I wanted to delve into it,\u201d he added. \u201cI’ve had a couple of friends of mine who have been involved in transitions, and so I’ve had some personal experience in it through people I care about. …<\/p>\n

\u201cI tried to learn my due diligence, if you like, and write something that felt, to me at least, to have truthfulness about it. And I hope that people will feel that when they read it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TORONTO \u2014 Salman Rushdie says the idea of setting his latest novel between two historic U.S. elections came to him …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":112531,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16],"tags":[353,21392,22857,1058],"class_list":["post-115978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news-ca","category-news","tag-obama","tag-rushdie","tag-the-golden-house","tag-trump","mauthors-lauren-la-rose","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115978\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}