Golden Gate, The (PB)

Recommendation to everyone. 200 plus pages of masterful poetry in prose form.

Nice

Enjoyed this book, one of the very few books in verse I have read, outside of Shakespeare. While the plot and characters do not have the scale or depth of a Shakespearan play, the timelessness of human emotions underly the entire plot. The story of loneliness, the hunger for love and understanding, the pain that comes through misunderstandings and words that are left unsaid. All made for an entertaining read in what is overall a work of light fiction, made meaningful by the words of worldly wisdom and pithy lines of poetry that are generously sprinkled throughout the book.

Seth is my most loved author. His style of writing is soothing like music and gentle breeze. Novel in verse can be so engrossing can't be under stood unless one reads The Golden Gate.

Awesome Service from Amazon.100% Original Print.

Not bought it

Lovely book, but amazon sent me a very old copy. There are yellow spots on the pages and the cover is fading.

This is a brilliant book, must say a unique novel. Must for all the book lovers. Highly engaging and interesting read.

For Vikram Seth's, The Golden Gate, a novel set in verse,I stayed up late and found it to be anything but terse.His style of writing, quite exciting, kept me in my seat.I found myself begin reciting to his funky beat.While not all styles of poetry are easily construed,his fluid verbal mastery was elegantly brewed.I knew I'd write, with keen insight, my thoughts in metered rhyme;although this isn't what he'd want, it's all I could opine.His story opens with the taleof John, a lonely single male,who's risen in the rank and filebut pines for one to walk the aisle.His empty life seems filled with strife,compelling him to find a wife.Now here comes Janet, once an ex,now just a friend (they don't have sex).She helps him rise above the fraywith sage support and, by the way,suggests he posts his personal,through which comes Liz, quite capableof keeping John from all that's dulland end his heart's persistent lull.Romance is lit, so now we flitto others in our growing skitof friends, lovers, sons and mothers,activists and nuclear druthers.All the while, the humor builds,injected by the writer's skills,not to distract from all the gloryof this now climactic story,but rather to have fun with styleand maybe just to make you smile.Through all the threads that Seth does weave,a tangled web of lives do cleavewhen, one by one, with damage done,our lovers break up; tears do run.The bigger picture that he paintswill make you see the many saintsthat linger in our lives each daybut ne'er we thank them, ne'er we say"I love you," until death may strayonto their path. They go awayand leave you crying as you prayfor one more chance, just one more way,to hold them, touch them, make them stay...In my conclusion, I will saythis gets five stars, without delay.Through Golden Gates do souls depart.In San Francisco lays my heart.

In der gesamten zeitgenössischen Literatur einzigartiges Lesen-Entzücken - für Anglophile! Versromane mag es geben - aber keinen, der sich so humvorvoll, geistreich, amüsant, sprachwitzig und formvollendet (Sonnette!) mit den jungen Erwachsenen (meine Generation) der 70er Jahre des letzten Jahrhunderts befasst. Für alle ehemaligen Blumenkinder, Hippies, 68er etc. eine wunderbare Erinnerung. Wer will sich an die Übertragung ins Deutsche wagen? (Ich.)

I originally picked this book up from a library on a whim, thinking that it might be an interesting experiment. I then pretty much read it from cover-to-cover without stopping! Such is the fluidity of the verse and the beauty of the language that you cannot help but be carried away by the rhythm.Not many books have the power to make you smile, think, laugh and cry but I defy anyone not to shed a tear as the final chapter begins.I've now bought six copies of this owing to the fact that I keep telling people they should read it and then have to combat their scepticism by lending them my copy which I never see again.This book really is a thing of beauty and should be essential reading not just for Seth fans but for anyone who enjoys the written word.

Clever, and very readable - the rythmic and rhyming structure is only occasionally noticeable and that's because it's really clever. The rest of the time, this simply reads as an engaging and interesting story about a set of characters I warmed to.

This book is one of a nearly extinct breed: a novel in verse. In that form lie its unique pleasures as well as its uncertain reception at some hands.The poet James Merrill, in his epic trilogy "The Changing Light at Sandover" has claimed that "forms what affirms". Does this mean that the satisfaction of the novel can only come if the line-breaks are reliably marginal? Linguists Whorf and Sapir have suggested that language constrains our thought - not so much in the realm of vocabulary as, again, in that of form. The radically different forms of, for instance, Hopi or Inuit constrain "what is relatively easy to say" and hence, what is said. Perhaps so. You'd expect that rhyming sonnets would constrain the voice of a novelist, but Vikram Seth has certainly shown here that is not necessarily the case. Chalk it up to a mastery of both form and story, though, not to versification. His technical skills extend to both realms.Moving, then, beyond form, we wonder about content of such a novel. Will the book wander (or waltz) into the deeply allegorical, the disconnected, the imagistic? After all, aren't those the consequences of poetic license? Have you read your Ashbery? Oddly, this poem is quite prosaic in that regard, it tells a tight, comprehensible story in a manner that is fluid but not embroidered. (By way of contrast, consider that you can easily find yourself spinning away in a vortex of magical metaphor in the latest Rushdie.) Novels, it would seem, are pretty much what we make of them. As one who has never really appreciated the modernist redesign of the novel, I found "The Golden Gate" to be a much more satisfying story - notwithstanding its several-hundred sonnets.The book is a well-textured story about a number of folks living their lives and relationships - apparently in the 80's. (Some reviewers have made much of the story's use of timestamped phraseology such as the use of "yuppie" and the like. Perhaps. But I'd imagine that the term "Okie" was equally a well-understood, sometimes overloaded, term of the 30's which we, nevertheless, can comfortably accept from Steinbeck.) The lives, loves and trials of these folks are presented with the careful painting and pacing of Anne Tyler and J. R. Lennon.Seth's verse in this book has been called "masterful". It is, indeed. Consider that the odd rhyme is hardly ever at hand for most of us, much less available when called upon, as he was, thousands of times. But Seth is more than a rhymer - something I noticed by contrast. I'm pretty sure the sonnet scheme he uses is the so-called "Pushkin rhyme." I only know this since I just struggled through a marginal translation of "Eugene Onegin" and noticed the similarity. But the sing-songy'ness of the Pushkin was gladly lacking in the Seth. He uses true poetic craft, line breaks and punctuation and word choice, to allow the reader to flow between a fluid, songlike verse and a more prosaic tale-telling. In other words, he uses the strengths of both forms when they serve, best, the needs of the work and the reader.So. Don't be afraid of the form. But also don't expect it to seem natural unless you have seen it before. I came to this book via a recommendation of Tom Disch in his essays in "The Castle of Indolence" (a 5-star plug there), and from a background in having sought out and read quite a number of long poems, epic poems and verse novels.If you taste this book more out of curiosity than experience, good for you! But grant yourself the time to bounce through the first dozen sonnets in the singy-songy phrasing that so many of us learned to be necessarily poetic many years ago. Then, as the story captures you, you will notice that the verse, with the help of Seth's subtle crafting, both lifts and disappears beneath the story. I'll read it again, and again.