Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie
Posted on Mar 25, 2008 under contemporary literature |
I actually don’t know if I had to review this book. I stayed a long time tormenting myself about it. I think that it is very bad so I shouldn’t mention it. But people around me were so confused and I got so many “but I heard it is very good” that I decided to write about it. I’m not sure if one could say that Rushdie is a very trendy author, like Coelho or something, but after reading some colleague’s reviews I ended up saying to myself that I should read one of his books. The book was there and I decided to embrace it.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories is, as the title suggests it very clearly, just a story, longer of course, during which Rushdie goes after a pattern of this gender. The narrative thread is pretty simple: Haroun and his father, brilliant storyteller, live in a city so sad that it forgot its own name. Actually, the sadness exists also in the nearby towns and people pay a great deal of money to hear Rashid and his wonderful stories. But when his wife leaves home, Rashid loses his gift.
What comes next are the adventures of the two in “the land of stories“, where they end up in the middle of a war (which is not exactly a war) between storytellers and the people who want to shut them up by poisoning their ocean of stories. No matter how bleak the last phrase may be, Rushdie doesn’t succeed to render this atmosphere in the presentation of the situations, for everything seems to be a mere joke.
I imagine that Rushdie meant well: indeed, people are sad, deeply immersed in their gloomy reality, and when it comes to stories, they say they are of no use. However, day dreaming and imagination are the antidote of their fate. You can see that if I accept this, I’m actually not part of their category. I would listen to a thousand stories, but they should be good.
But Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a bad story. It is bad because Rushdie is trying too hard to create a fantastic world. There are too many “creatures”, machines, “processes that are too hard to explain”, each being described by a great amount of extraordinary features, until it becomes unbearable. It’s like an “imagination” competition.
Written by Raluca