Navigation
•
Home
•
Members
•
Papers
•
Forums
•
Search
•
Signup
•
Links
•
Contact Us
•
About
Top 10
Popular Essays
Rated Essays
Newest Essays
Report
Print
Add to Favorites
Report
Messages
Rate
Similar Reports
Help
Haroun and the sea of stories (Click to select text)
Haroun and the Sea of Stories Haroun and the Sea of Stories is Salman Rushdie's gentlest book, a fairy-tale like story that continues the tradition of Orwell's "Animal Farm". The book is about the land where stories are made, Rashid who is "the Shah of Blah, with oceans of notions and the Gift of the Gab" and his son Haroun. When Rashid loses his gift, his son embarks on an quest to recover it. Interspersed in this delightful tale are some poignant moments dealing with freedom of speech and expression. The book can be read as a commentary on "The thousand and one Arabian nights", placing it as a triumph of the imagination over draconian authority, and the appeal of the tale to even the meanest among us. Yet, it is also a sobering story, the imagination does run out in the face of unrelenting pressure from the unimaginative despot. From the back cover of the penguin edition of Haroun and the Sea of Stories: Haroun and the Sea of Stories is an adventure novel, the story of a father and son, of Rashid and Haroun, and of Haroun's determination to rescue his father and return to him his special gift. It has a mad bus driver named Butt and a water genie named Iff. It has a floating gardener and a pair of fishes with mouths all over their bodies. It has the wonderful city of Gup (where it is always light) and the terrible land of Chup (where it is always dark). And, perhaps most important, it has P2C2E. Processes Too Complicated To Explain. Salman Rushdie was awarded a Writer's Guild award for Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Haroun as a children's book a review by Jon Shemitz Heard Instinct's page on their adaptation of Haroun for puppet shows they do Back to Published Works Salman Rushdie | Subir Grewal | haroun@trill-home.com Jon's Homeschool Resource Page Micro-review: "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" by Salman Rushdie Miscellaneous / General Education / Micro Reviews OK, I'll admit it from the start: I might not have looked at this book in the first place, had it not been for the author's notoriety as one of the (all too many) authors some fundies are trying to kill for "blaspheming" one of their "sacred" books. Odds are, that's what led the local bookstore to buy a lot of copies and display them face out in the "young adult" rack, not the rather enthusiastic reviews from quite respectable sources (the Times Literary Supplement; the New York Times Book Review; Stephen King), and probably not their own judgement that this is a great book - but it is. This is Rushdie's first book since The Satanic Verses (and, I'm a bit ashamed to say, the first book of his that I've read). While it's not explicitly a "kids' book", it is definitely a great book for kids, much like Alice in Wonderland or the Arabian Nights, both of which it rather resembles. It definitely stands on its own, though, and may well end up as a classic in its own right. Haroun is the only child of Rashid, a storyteller in "a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name". (Those of you with better memories than I might have noticed that they are "named after the legendary Caliph of Baghdad, Haroun al-Rashid, who features in many Arabian Nights tales.") Rashid is an amazingly prolific and inventive storyteller who ascribes his success to his subscription to water from the Sea of Stories. When Rashid's wife runs off with the clerk upstairs, Rashid suddenly finds himself unable to speak in public, and discontinues his subscription. Haroun doesn't believe in the Water Genie and the Sea of Stories - until, getting up in the middle of the night, he surprises the Genie, and manages to parlay a purloined tool into a trip to Earth's other Moon, Kahani [or "story", in Hindustani] to try to get his father's subscription restored. Rashid rather mysteriously manages to appear on Kahani, too, and he and (mostly) Haroun manage to save the forces of Language from the forces of Silence. Happy endings all around; much beautifully-written, fast-paced fun along the way - good luck putting this one down! As far as age-appropriateness goes: I think that any child who can follow (or read) the Taran books, Alice, or The Hobbit can follow (or read) Haroun. I got it for Sam for his 6th birthday, and he absolutely loves it: he goes around asking silly questions to which we are supposed to reply "a P2C2E" (process too complicated to explain - a phrase you may be sure he never heard before), and likes to write Salman Rushdie in paint programs and with markers. When I told him I was going to write a review (of sorts), he told me to be sure to mention Iff, the Water Genie, and Butt, the Hoopoe, and now I have. Imho, a fine addition to any Great Childrens' Books list. No sex or religion; very little "real" violence. HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES (1990) was written for children, and weaved in the story an affable robot, genies, talking fish, dark villains, and an Arabian princess in need of saving. Writer Ahmed Salman Rushdie, b. Bombay, India, June 19, 1947, is best known for his novel The Satanic Verses (1989), a fantasy whose publication aroused the wrath of many Muslims and persuaded Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini to offer a multimillion-dollar reward for the author's assassination. Rushdie was forced to go into hiding. Rushdie's work hinges on his many identities--an Indian Muslim who writes in English, whose family left India for Pakistan, and who now lives in England. Midnight's Children (1981), which first brought Rushdie a wide audience and won Britain's Booker Prize, is an allegory about the birth of independent India. Shame (1983) focuses on Pakistan's recent rulers. The Satanic Verses is a complex work whose two protagonists, like Rushdie, are expatriate Indians. The passage describing the birth of a religion resembling Islam are seen as blasphemous by Muslims, and the book has been banned in most Islamic countries. Despite Rushdie's denial of any intentional blasphemy, and his pubic decision in 1990 "to enter into the body of Islam after a lifetime spent outside it," his death sentence remained in force. He as continued to write, however, publishing both the children's tales in Haroun and the Sea of Stories and the essays in Imaginary Homelands in 1991. Bibliography. Brennan, T., Salman Rushdie and the Third World (1989); Weatherby, W. J., Salman Rushdie (1990).
Recent Board Topics
Please drop by and sign up.
[
Submit Essay
] - [
Privacy
] - [
Disclaimer
] - [
Email Us
]
Copyright 2003 EssayFarm.com