Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Haroun and the Sea of Stories

I thought the book "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" was well written and a fun book to read. This is a story about friendship, fight for justice and honesty. It makes the reader feel like a child again. Rushdie showed in this book his good knowledge of human imagination. This is a reminder of that magical world with bad creatures and the ones with big hearts that always win a war. 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 a quest to recover it.

This story is comparable to other stories like "Alice in Wonderland" in that it is a fairy tale, since the novel is based around this place, Kahani, the earth's second moon, where stories are made and kept alive. Rushdie's characters and dreamlike settings are deliriously inventive. It is similar to "Alice in Wonderland" where Alice is in her own fantasy land.

In this tale are some powerful moments dealing with freedom of speech and expression. The force of evil in this story is silence, an enforced silence, the quashing of language, fantasy, satire - even the truth itself. There are plenty of allegories and light-hearted commentary woven into the tapestry. The Princess Batcheat is a bit much to put up with, as are the people we must sometimes defend on principles such as freedom of expression.

I found the ending interesting when you find out that the city Haroun and Rashid live in, "the city that forgot its name," has the same name as the "fantasy land," Kahani, that Haroun was just in. Also, during the story Haroun would hint that people in the fantasy land reminded him of people he knew in his own city. Also the fact that what made Haroun's father lose his talent of telling stories, Soraya, Rashid's wife, left him for someone else, was back and she referred to the man she left the same as Khattam-shud.

You can see how Salman Rushdie used real life material in this fairy tale story. He used Hindustani words to describe things, and did this by using the words as names of people and things so that the word would describe how the person or thing was or what it represented.