Haroun and The Following Story

Some I really like Haroun and The Sea of Stories, it's right up my alley--magical, flowing prose with an epic story and lots of fun introspection into characters and the idea of stories themselves. Here's some of my favorite quotes:

'Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of Language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. "It's finished," we tell one another, "it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End."'

 This particular quote is fantastic! I like the message here, but what I like even more is the emphasis put on words. "Stories, Language, Arch-Enemy, The End," all these words are capitalized. I think this drives home one of the best parts of the story, the incredible power and importance of stories.

"...the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive."

 I love the references to the cyclical nature of stories, and how they morph and change to match current fashions. Once again, the importance of stories!

"Iff replied that the Plentimaw Fishes were what he called 'hunger artists'..."

Nice reference to Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist". Intertext is great.

"Dark, my sirs, has its fascinations: mystery, strangeness, romance...'"

Love this line, reminds me of the one in Harry Potter when Dumbledore tells Harry that we don't fear the dark, we fear the unknown--I guess we love it too...

"You think it's easy for a girl to get a job like this? Don't you know that girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?"

 This is one of my favorite things about "lowbrow" literature, and children and young adult literature. The subtle insertion of lines like this gives a maturity that people often take for granted. Who would have thought feminist sentiment would have appeared in such an innocent book?

"There lies a world, a story-world, that I cannot Rule at all"

God, the power of stories, does it ever get old?

My favorite part of the book though, starts on page 205, when Rashid tells Haroun's story. I am a sucker for frame narratives (my favorite movie is Big Fish) and this is just the icing on the cake of a great novel, nothing like being immortalized as a character in a story.

The Following Story reminded me a lot of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf. The way the writing kind of meanders about is definitely a unique style, though it's not exactly my cup of tea. I did, however, enjoy immensely the last pages where the reader begins to understand what the boat is, and the work becomes magical in its descriptions of the last moments of the characters on it. Hopefully, when something better to say about it comes to mind, I'll blog it.