The Golden House

 

The Golden House by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While the plot is not as propulsive as it sets itself up to be (countless," but we could not foresee the damage it would cause", etc.) and there are a thousand references to books and movies that I think only a movie nut would know, the writing is so good that you read it just to keep consuming the sentences. There is something ineffable in Rushdie's writing--I can't tell you why it is so good. It is neither particularly poetic or uniquely creative; it just flows along in long sentences that glide like honey. There is a lot of mediation about what identity actually means in this day and age--can we choose it, it is chosen for us, can we change it, is it all about perception? Having an aspiring film maker tell it is genius too, because don't we all view our lives and those around us as being the subject of our own special film--we edit and revise to let the situation suit us. I've never read Rushdie before, but I will seek him out now.

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"If you use that it opens de third eye in your pineal gland in de center of your forehead and you become clairvoyant and few secrets can be kept from you".   "Then why have you never used it," I asked.  "Because a world vissout mystery its like a picture with no showdown," he said.  "By seeing too much it shows you nossing."

A name is nothing, it's a handle, as they say here, just a way of opening a door.

Construction work was the art of making the city become aware of itself as a fragile organism at the mercy of forces against which there was no appeal.