Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Haroun and the Sea of Stories

SALMAN RUSHDIE

Novel, 1990. Summary.

In this story we encounter storytelling as a means of saving your identity, your relationship with your family, and perhaps even your life—which means that, in a sense, you are saving a world. The British-Indian author Salman Rushdie (b. 1947) had to go underground after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses in 1988. The book was considered blasphemous to Islam by the fundamentalist government of Iran, which issued a death warrant against him. He says that he reached a point where he was so distressed he wasn’t able to think of any stories to tell. But he worked himself out of his depression, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a book for children and other people who have a natural love for stories, is the result. This modern fairy tale has many surprising elements, but here we will focus just on the core issue: why stories have value.

Haroun’s father Rashid is a professional storyteller and a very popular one. He usually tells cheerful stories, even though they live in a very sad city. Haroun is beginning to ask questions about his father’s storytelling: Where do the stories come from? From the great Story Sea, says Rashid, and you have to be a subscriber to the water, which comes from a tap installed by one of the Water-Genies. But Haroun doesn’t believe him. And now a sad thing happens in their lives: Haroun’s mother Soraya with the beautiful voice leaves her husband and child for another tenant in their apartment building, Mr. Sengupta, who once told Haroun, What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true? Rashid is at a loss for what to do, because all he knows is storytelling, and now Haroun himself shouts the terrible words at his father, What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true? Soon after, in front of a huge audience in a city in the mountains, Rashid finds that he has lost the gift of gab: He has run out of stories. His stories are finito, khattam-shud (which means...