Haroun and The Sea Of Stories

Rushdie Salman

Description

In a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name, lived a professional storyteller named Rashid and his son Haroun.' Thus begins Rushdie's magical and delightful book, which is comprised of hundreds of stories, funny and sad, all of them juggled at once, together with sorcery and love, wicked uncles and fat aunts, and mustachioed gangsters in yellow check pants.

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 14 octobre 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9789351182832
• Langue: English

Extrait

Salman Rushdie

HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES
Contents
About the Author
Dedication

1: The Shah of Blah
2: The Mail Coach
3: The Dull Lake
4: An Iff and a Butt
5: About Guppees and Chupwalas
6: The Spy s Story
7: Into the Twilight Strip
8: Shadow Warriors
9: The Dark Ship
10: Haroun s Wish
11: Princess Batcheat
12: Was It the Walrus?
About the Names in this Book
Follow Penguin
Copyright
About the Author
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in 1947. He is the author of four other novels, Grimus, Midnight s Children, Shame and The Satanic Verses. He is also the author of The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey and two documentary films, The Riddle of Midnight and The Painter and the Pest. He has won a number of literary prizes, including the Booker Prize in 1981 and the Whit-bred Prize for the best novel of 1988.
Praise for Salman Rushdie
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Haroun and the Sea of Stories is one of those books which transcends generations with a story that appeals to all. Rushdie s simple, lucid narrative is packed with insight which never overwhelms or diminishes the storytelling . . . Rushdie uses the simplest language in his tale and evokes vivid and clear images. He has an excellent sense of the rhythm of language, and the entire novel is laced with deft humor. The characters are lively and memorable; the reader cares about what happens to them. Best of all, the story is so accessible that each reader is certain to get something out of it . . . There is an underlying message about the importance of free speech and independent thought, but the message never overwhelms the story; it enhances it. Finally, it is also a story about the love between a parent and a child.
-Granta
( Haroun and the Sea of Stories is) an eloquent a defense of art as any Renaissance treatise . . . saturated with the hyperreal colour of such classic fantasies as The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland.
-Publishers Weekly
Rushdie s first book ( Haroun and the Sea of Stories ) since the controversial Satanic Verses is more a postmodern fairy tale in the style of Angela Carter or John Barth than a traditional novel. The story is allegorical rather than realistic, the characters emblematic and two-dimensional. Poignant parallels between Rashid s predicament and Rushdie s own situation are what hold the reader s interest . . .
-Library Journal
Midnight s Children
The literary map of India is about to be redrawn. The familiar outline-E.M. Forster s outline essentially-will always be there . . . What this fiction has been missing is a different kind of ambition, something just a little coarse, a hunger to swallow India whole and spit it out. It needed a touch of Saul Bellow s Augie March brashness, Bombay rather than Chicago-born, and going at things in its own special Bombay way. Now, in Midnight s Children, Salman Rushdie has realized that ambition . . . Midnight s Children sounds like a continent finding its voice.
-The New York Times
( Midnight s Children is) one of the most important books to come out of the English-speaking world in this generation.
-The New York Review of Books
Salman Rushdie has written a dark and complex allegory of his nation s first 31 years. The narrative (of Midnight s Children ) conveys vindictiveness and pathos, humor and pain, and Rushdie s language and imagery are brilliant. Although his . . . point of view is reminiscent of recent works of Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his closest affinities are with V.S. Naipaul. It is as if he has fused that writer s early comic vision (A House for Mr Biswas ) with the dark pessimism of his more recent works (A Bend in the River; A Wounded Civilization). Not bad company for a young writer.
-The New Republic
The Satanic Verses
The author of The Satanic Verses creates a fascinating family saga about the birth and maturity of a land and its people-a brilliant incarnation of the human comedy. Rushdie has achieved a magnificent and unique work of fiction.
-The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Moor s Last Sigh
The Moor s Last Sigh is a novel about modern India. Its hero is Moraes Zogoiby of Bombay, nicknamed by his mother the Moor . But the famous sigh to which the title refers was breathed five centuries ago, in 1493, when Muhammad XI, last sultan of Andalusia, bade farewell to his kingdom, bringing an end Arab-Islamic dominance in Iberia . . . Rushdie pursues palimpsesting with considerable vigor in The Moor s Last Sigh, as a novelistic, historiographical, and autobiographical device . . . Like Midnight s Children (1981), Shame (1983), and The Satanic Verses (1989), The Moor s Last Sigh is a novel with large ambitions composed on a large scale.
-The New York Review of Books
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Ultimately, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a triumphant hymn to the transforming power of love, boldly asserting that fate is only a fiction and that you can sometimes strengthen history by speculating on its alternative solution.
-The London Times
. . . [E]xuberant and elegiac . . . his best since Midnight s Children . . . What Rushdie is doing goes well beyond joke and whimsy. The world of this novel ( The Ground Beneath Her Feet ) . . . exists at a wide angle to reality but also makes us wonder what would happen if the angle closed . . . [I]n this book . . . he finds . . . a direct line to the world s ashamed unconfident heart, and makes us laugh with the sheer proliferating energy of his call.
-The New York Times Book Review
. . . [A]ddresses the themes of exile, metamorphosis and flux, and . . . examines such issues through the prism of multiple dichotomies; between home and rootlessness, love and death, East and West, reason and the irrational . . . the opening portions of the novel (The Ground Beneath Her Feet) are animated by scenes that conjure up the burbling, Dickensian life of Bombay with Mr Rushdie s patented lan . . . [H]e has called [the book] an everything novel . . .
-The New York Times
Buoyant, bonhomous, punning, this novel imparts a creative joy, the most generous in such free pleasure since Midnight s Children. I suspects that it (The Ground Beneath Her Feet) will deservedly become Rushdie s most enjoyed book.
-The Guardian
Rushdie, to be fair, does achieve life. He achieves it . . . in his language, which is innocently alive, and which he awards to all of his characters, so that they begin to share some of the vitalism of their author.
-The New Republic
Fury
[M]ost of Fury is relentlessly set in the New York of last year, and records, as if offering the pages of a calendar, the city s large and small events . . .
-New Republic
The sea change has invigorated Rushdie. His new novel ( Fury ) is very much an American book, a bitingly satiric, often wildly farcical picture of American society in the first years of the 21 st century.
-Publishers Weekly
Malik is a very fully realized character, and Fury positively vibrates with intellectual energy (it s also frequently quite funny).
- Kirkus Reviews
Z embla, Zenda, Xanadu: A ll our dream-worlds may come true. F airy lands are fearsome too. A s I wander far from view R ead, and bring me home to you.

1
The Shah of Blah

T here was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue.
In the north of the sad city stood mighty factories in which (so I m told) sadness was actually manufactured, packaged and sent all over the world, which never seemed to get enough of it. Black smoke poured out of the chimneys of the sadness factories and hung over the city like bad news.
And in the depths of the city, beyond an old zone of ruined buildings that looked like broken hearts, there lived a happy young fellow by the name of Haroun, the only child of the storyteller Rashid Khalifa, whose cheerfulness was famous throughout that unhappy metropolis, and whose never-ending stream of tall, short and winding tales had earned him not one but two nicknames. To his admirers he was Rashid the Ocean of Notions, as stuffed with cheery stories as the sea was full of glumfish; but to his jealous rivals he was the Shah of Blah. To his wife, Soraya, Rashid was for many years as loving a husband as anyone could wish for, and during these years Haroun grew up in a home in which, instead of misery and frowns, he had his father s ready laughter and his mother s sweet voice raised in song.
Then something went wrong. (Maybe the sadness of the city finally crept in through their windows.)
The day Soraya stopped singing, in the middle of a line, as if someone had thrown a switch, Haroun guessed there was trouble brewing. But he never suspected how much.

Rashid Khalifa was so busy making up and telling stories that he didn t notice that Soraya no longer sang; which probably made things worse. But then Rashid was a busy man, in constant demand, he was the Ocean of Notions, the famous Shah of Blah. And what with all his rehearsals and performances, Rashid was so often on stage that he lost track of what was going on in his own home. He sped around the city and the country telling stories, while Soraya stayed home, turning cloudy and even a little thunderous and brewing up quite a storm.
Haroun went with his father whenever he could, because the man was a magician, it couldn t be denied. He would climb up on to some little makeshift stage in a dead-end alley packed with raggedy children and toothless old-timers, all squatting in the dust; and once he got going even the city s many wandering cows would stop and cock their ears, and monkeys would jabber approvingly from rooftops and the parrots in the trees would imitate his voice.
Haroun often thought of his father as a Juggler, because his stories