Reviews of The Château
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New novel combines Florida condos, corrupt elections and TrumpThe Chateau has been mentioned in The New York Post's Page Six
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Only The Mad Will Make It In The World Of 'The Chateau'
"The Chateau reads like a part-time re-tread of Gogol's The Government Inspector, full of mistaken identity, betrayal and crime. Like a satire of a satire, spiked with contemporaneous observations on dissident politics and the toxic souring of the American Dream. It is, at times, antic — twitchy with its own internal energy. It whipsaws between fury and depression, dressing the hard realities of aging and debt and crime in a cotton candy tutu and star-spangled pasties. At moments, it is like Stanislaw Lem writing real estate copy for The Atlantic. At others, like Carl Hiaasen getting under the Florida blacktop and smelling the swamp beneath. And all through, it is bonkers — a careening voyage that feels like falling because never does it seem like Goldberg is completely in control of his own plot, pen or characters." |
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'The Château': Sun and skulduggery in South Florida
"Alternately cringing and chuckling at his own characters, Goldberg knows all too well that comedy is just tragedy plus time. Almost in spite of himself (and almost surely to spite his old man), Bill is less of a Luftmensch than a true mensch, someone who ultimately, if begrudgingly, does the right thing - no matter how much of the bargain-basement vodka known as Kozachok it takes to get there." |
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Fiction Chronicle: A Sunny Place for Shady People
"Mr. Goldberg apes the comic novels of centuries past by filling his omniscient narration with entreaties to the “dear reader” (“Our role is to convey these events as they occur,” he writes) while following Bill’s increasingly preposterous travels through the condo. [...] Mr. Goldberg has written a funny, antic novel for the masochists who don’t get their full of political farce from cable news—in other words, alas, for all of us." |
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Review: Paul Goldberg’s ‘The Chateau’ sets sharp political satire in a Florida condo
"Goldberg brings a similar brand of zany, absurdist humor laced with dark social commentary. (I was reminded often of Catch-22.) Goldberg also knows the Sunshine State. At one point, Bill is talking to his father’s wife, no-nonsense Nella, about whether something is legal. 'Listen yourself to what you say," Nella says. "We live in Florida. Understand? Flo-ri-da.' " |
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Kirkus Starred Review
"A master of dark, cutting humor, restless and allusive, Goldberg turns the Château, its Lexus-driving Russians, and a nearly 90-year-old American WWII veteran who drunkenly shoots at the ocean with his machine gun every night into a mad metaphor for Trump’s America... Following up his acclaimed debut, The Yid (2016), Goldberg confirms his status as one of Jewish fiction's liveliest new voices, walking in the shoes of such deadpan provocateurs as Mordecai Richler and Stanley Elkin." |
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The Chateau
"Goldberg’s second novel, after The Yid, is a salty, witty, tragic comedy that mocks Russian Jewish immigrants, Florida retirees, condo living, “Donal’d Tramp,” elderly sex, old folks who scam the early bird dinner specials, and more... Filled with gags, slapstick, and snappy repartee, this satire provides sharp commentary on American society as well as an affecting story of old people with nowhere to go and no way to get there." |
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Loopy Butt-Surgeon and Disgraced Ex-Journalist Meet in ‘The Chateau’
"Goldberg’s style, on occasion, dips into a sort of lyrical fluidity detached from arcs and narratives and instead shows us a series of impulses and instincts and meanderings belonging to the brain and heart of his main character, all of which is so easily understood even if not entirely linear, as if he is writing something that is itself only intelligible to our gut—something that plays into the meanderings of our brains and hearts." |
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Paul Goldberg's The Château
"In a novel concerned with Russianness and Trump’s inauguration, it is not surprising that the question of Russia’s impact on the 2016 American election occasionally arises. Happily, the novel is less concerned with collusion, a shallow question of logistics, than it is with convergence (“Kleptocrats of the world converge!” Bill says at one point), a deeper question of the dynamics that have caused two countries that led the world in the second-half of the twentieth-century to be ruled by white-supremacist gangsters in 2017." |
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Book Reviews: ‘Château’ Entertains
"Goldberg has a certain flourish with words, creating a lively tale in a microcosm of Trump’s (or Donal’d Tramp, as the Russian residents call him) America... The writing is lively, the characters eccentric, the plotline captivating... It’s creative and darkly funny at the right moments, and showcases Goldberg’s prowess for language, as did his debut novel last year." |
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Russian 'veterans of making it through' find their way to Florida
"His lyrical passages about being airborne reveal an aspect of Goldberg's writing kept under wraps throughout the rest of the book. Perhaps he saved it for the end. His general observations may or may not satisfy readers fond of closure, but at times we must make do with ambiguity. Anyway, The Chateau is rich enough to read more than once." |
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The literary world is taking on the Trump era, for good and for ill
"Paul Goldberg’s second novel is set in the week leading up to Trump’s inauguration as president, and — though alternately satirical, trippy, and melancholy in style — it’s consumed by the topics and debates now dominating our discourse... Goldberg’s commentary on all things Trump is so relentless it can read like a left-leaning Twitter feed’s consolidation into literary prose. But his book resonates, weighted as it is by a now-familiar stripe of existential sadness. At one point in the novel, Bill is told about Trump, “He lives in your closet, he lives in your head, he lives in your soul, and there — in those places — he always lived.” |
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'The Château': Florida condominium conflict satirizes Trump’s America
“What made you give up on decency?” asks 52-year-old son Bill, hero of Paul Goldberg’s “The Château,” his second novel and a scathing satire of Trump’s America. “You threw it out like a used condom. What made you so smug? Do you even understand what I’m saying?” We’re not given answers to these questions; as with most satire, “The Château” paints with a broad brush in castigating the way things are rather than exploring why Melsor and legions like him have betrayed their best selves, while growing criminally selfish and mean. But Goldberg’s mordant satire – invoking and channeling a distinguished Russian literary tradition extending back to Gogol – hits home and bites hard. |
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Review: Paul Goldberg’s The Château looks at Trump through fictional lens
"Taking a macro view, Goldberg, a journalist and the author of an acclaimed earlier novel, The Yid, deftly grafts the language and ideas of Trump's presidential campaign, and now the first year of his presidency, onto his second fictional work. The effect is a reading experience that's unmistakably set in Trump's America, which could make you want to stop reading, but you shouldn't. The Châteauisn't toxic. You won't choke. In the growing category of Trump novels, which includes Salman Rushdie's The Golden House, this entry will make you laugh. The reason? Goldberg's "microcosm."" |
Reviews of The Yid
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Jan. 19, 2015: Publishers Weekly"In his first acquisition after over a decade in the industry, James Meader, executive v-p of publicity at Picador, preempted world rights to Paul Goldberg’s debut novel, The Yid. Josh Getzler at Hannigan Salky Getzler represented Goldberg, the longtime editor of the Cancer Letter, an online weekly that shares information on, among other things, new treatments and research. The novel, Meader said, is “darkly comic” and was pitched as “Inglourious Basterds crossed with Seven Samurai, with echoes of Shakespeare, Yiddish humor, and tragicomedy.” The Yid follows a group of intellectuals in Moscow in 1953—among them an actor, a doctor, and an African-American living in Moscow—who hatch a plot to assassinate Stalin."
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Claiming the Yid
I grew up in Moscow, speaking a surprising amount of Yiddish for a secular kid born in 1959. I could haggle with my grandmother about whether the weather required that a hat be worn, and I knew the meaning of the colorful insults my grandparents lovingly flung at each other. Alas, somebody forgot to tell me that I was Jewish. As far as I knew, my grandparents spoke a dialekt, and they came from a mestechko, the Russian word for shtetl.
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Release no. XVII:
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Interview with WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi"D.C.-based writer Paul Goldberg is no stranger to non-fiction. And his debut satirical novel – “The Yid” – draws both from history, set in the Stalin-era Soviet Union, and his own personal experience. We talk with Goldberg about the story, how living in D.C. shapes his work and his ‘day job’ overseeing the influential Cancer Letter project."
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The Yid Playlist on Largehearted BoyIn the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
"A playlist was a writing tool I used constantly as I wrote The Yid, a dark comedy set in Moscow of 1953. Songs helped me establish connections with Russian history and with my characters. This playlist is, in effect, the novel's back panel. Remove it, and you will see the wiring. My relationship with these songs precedes The Yid. I grew up with most of them; I can sing most of them, though God knows I shouldn't." |
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91.3 WYSO - Book NookWYSO's Vick Mickunas interviews Paul Goldberg.
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Jewish Book Council - The Prosen PeoplePaul Goldberg first heard a Moscow version of the myth about Jews using blood for religious rituals when he was ten, in 1969. By the time he emigrated to the US in 1973, he had collected the Moscow stories that underpin his debut novel, The Yid. Paul is blogging here all week as a Visiting Scribe here on The ProsenPeople.
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NY1 - The New York Times Close UpOn the February 20, 2016 edition of "The New York Times Close Up," hosted by Sam Roberts...Paul Goldberg describes some of his sources of inspiration for his debut novel "The Yid," just reviewed in the Sunday Times Book Review.
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WNYC - The Leonard Lopate ShowIn his debut novel, The Yid award-winning investigative reporter Paul Goldberg tells the story of a ramshackle group of Yiddish-speaking artists and actors who devise a convoluted plan to assassinate Joseph Stalin just before his death in 1953.
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Observer - Book Culture: ‘The Yid’ Is at Home on the Upper West SideOn a Thursday evening last week, just past a table laden with colorful knit scarves and gloves, earrings and necklaces that would not be out of place at a crafts fair, candles and chess sets, an ornamentally large magnifying glass and a $734 black iron candelabra, Paul Goldberg read from his debut novel, The Yid.
In his pronounced Russian accent, Mr. Goldberg spoke about the title, which reclaims the derogatory epithet. |
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Jewish Journal - ‘The Yid’ embarks on a hero’s journeyMoscow-born author and journalist Paul Goldberg first learned about the so-called blood libel — the hateful lie alleging Jews use Christian blood in their rituals — in a place where slander against the Jews is deeply rooted. After immigrating to the United States in 1973, Goldberg began to report and write about the Soviet human rights movement (“The Final Act” and “The Thaw Generation”) as well as the business and politics of cancer, but he did not forget the stories that he’d brought with him from the Soviet Union, the literature of the blood libel. Now, at last, he has unpacked those stories and put them to use in “The Yid” (Picador), a brilliant novel that is at once surreally comic, suspenseful — if slightly cracked — and punctuated with eruptions of violence, but with a poignant ending.
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