As it happened, I had a white school friend, and he invited me to go to the club for a swim. Finally it gave an inch: it said that if a white member wished to bring in a brown guest, that brown person would be admitted. This didn’t go down well in newly independent India but the club was resistant to change. I could look down into it from my bedroom window. As Haroun realizes, ``He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.'' (Jan.And here’s a true story: at the bottom of the hill where we lived, in the Breach Candy neighborhood of Bombay (now Mumbai), there was a private swimming club. Rather than retreating under the famous death threats, Rushdie reiterates the importance of literature, stressing not just the good of stories ``that aren't even true'' but persuading us that these stories convey the truth. It's almost as if Rushdie has invented a new form, the meta-fable.

But although the pyrotechnics here are entertaining in and of themselves, the irresistible force of the novel rests in Rushdie's wholehearted embrace of the fable-its form as well as its significance. Saturated with the hyperreal color of such classic fantasies as the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland, Rushdie's fabulous landscape operates by P2C2Es (Processes Too Complicated To Explain), features a court where all the attendant Pages are numbered, and unfurls a riotous display of verbal pranks (one defiant character chants ``You can chop suey, but / You can't chop me!'' elsewhere, from another character: `` `Gogogol,' he gurgled. Repentant, Haroun quests through a fantastic realm in order to restore his father's gift for storytelling. The clocks freeze: time literally stops when the ability to narrate its passing is lost. ``What's the use of stories that aren't even true?'' Haroun demands, parroting the neighbor and thus unintentionally paralyzing Rashid's imagination. Supposedly begun as a bedtime story for Rushdie's son, Haroun concerns a supremely talented storyteller named Rashid whose wife is lured away by the same saturnine neighbor who poisons Rashid's son Haroun's thoughts. Following the unprecedented controversy generated by The Satanic Verses, Rushdie offers as eloquent a defense of art as any Renaissance treatise.

Sea of stories salman rushdie