It was pure, unexpected,
good luck that I chanced upon a book on CD written by Salman Rushdie, read by
Salman Rushdie, in a library in Paducah, Kentucky. My experience of Kentucky
outside Lexington or Louisville was that xenophobia was rampant so the library
offering a book with such a foreign source of origin was a shock.
The book was "Haroun and
the Sea of Stories". I started listening to the book in the car on the way home.
It was my plan to listen whenever I drove anywhere. Sometimes things don’t go
as planned. This was one of those times.
The story and the
narration were so compelling. I didn’t go home. I veered away at the last
minute and went to the lake. I called home and made excuses so I could spend
the next five hours listening to the book. I had water. There was a bathroom. I
could take walk breaks. Why not?
Haroun Khalifa is the
protagonist. He’s a young boy and he starts out believing that stories that
aren’t true are useless. Which is sad because telling stories is what his
father Rashid does for a living. And even sadder is the fact that Rashid’s
storytelling ability is failing him.
Life is further
complicated because Haroun’s mother Soraya has left him and his father for
their neighbor, Mr. Sengupta. Rashid and Haroun board a yacht captained by Mr.
Butt who is taking them to the Land Of K to tell stories for the campaign of a
politician named Snooty Buttoo.
Haroun cannot sleep so he
is awake when the yacht is boarded by a water genie named Iff whose job is to
take away Rashid’s imagination. Haroun demands to speak with Iff’s supervisor,
the Walrus in an effort to save his father’s gift.
Haroun and Iff’s journey
through the Sea Of Stories is interrupted when they are captured by the
antagonist Khattam-Shud who is determined to put an end to stories.
***Slightly off topic – does
this sound familiar to anyone? Are there villains today trying to stop the
telling of stories that, though true, reveal their villainous natures?***
Many things happen
including magical details of Salman Rushdie’s writing that are delightful.
P2C2E for example is Processes Too Complicated Too Explain which is a phrase
used several times when Iff and the Walrus cannot make Haroun understand
something.
Haroun and company, joined
by the hero, Mali the story gardener, are investigating the Old Zone when
Khattam-Shud kidnaps them. They learn that Khattam-Shud plans on plugging the
Story Source at the bottom of the Sea. That source is the origin of all stories
ever communicated. Mali manages to destroy the machines being used to poison
the sea. Haroun diverts the giant plug meant to seal the source.
The Walrus promises Haroun
a happy ending for his own personal story while Khattam-Shud is crushed under a
huge statue of himself that he had commissioned.
When Rashid and Haroun
return home, their city has been released from the state of misery it was in
and Soraya has returned home.
Most of the plot takes
place on the fictional Moon Kahani which consists of a massive ocean composed
of an infinite number of stories. Each current or stream is a piece of story
and Rushdie shows clearly how the pieces connect in different ways to create
unique stories.
It should come as no
surprise that Salman Rushdie can write a powerful tale in the genre of magical
realism. His personal magic is legendary. While loneliness and the longing for
companionship are a modern-day plague, Rushdie in real life meets and marries
his wife even while living in hiding because Iran’s supreme leader, Khomeni has
issued a fatwa calling for his death.
Rushdie’s genius is
recognized with many accolades. He was knighted in 2007 for services to
literature. At the same time religious extremists hate him because of his
fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. He was stabbed and almost died during a
speaking engagement in New York in 2022.
I only wish that this man
who wrote the book which so thoroughly consumed and entertained me was writing
real life today. I would embrace a happy ending. I would revel in the justice
of leaders destroyed by the weight of their own oppressive, self-glorifying
actions. And the victory of the restored freedom to tell any story over the
attempts to squash those stories that don’t serve certain factions of humanity,
would put a smile on my face everyday for months, years, decades even.
Author Barbara Kingsolver
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2023. The winning novel she wrote is
titled. “Demon Copperhead”. In an interview she has said that her novel
is the contemporary version of Charles Dickens novel, “David Copperfield”. It’s the
“David Copperfield” of Kingsolver’s time and place.
I recently read a meme
(source unattributed) that said:
“Reading and writing cannot
be separated. Reading is breathing in; writing is breathing out.”
My favorite author, Jennifer
Crusie believes and embodies this. Before writing her first novel, she taught
high school English. She taught the gothic novel, “The Turning Of the Screw”
by Henry James every year. When she taught it she thought – I could write this
story better. So she did.
“Maybe This Time”
is Crusie’s version of a gothic romance novel and, in my opinion, it’s better
than Henry James’s book. I was lucky enough to see her speak and get my
hardcover copy of this book signed.
Jenny has more than twenty
novels, many of which are on the NYT bestseller list. She gets ideas from a lot
of places but reading stories and watching stories definitely contribute. She
has another novel that is, as yet, unpublished, titled “The Devil and Nita
Dodd”. It is a novel spawned from watching the television series, Lucifer,
and being annoyed by the bad writing for a show full of actors so skilled, she,
and many others, me included, kept watching.
Of course, I can abuse
anything, including reading. I have just started a second reread, back-to-back,
of the sixteen books in Jayne Castle’s Harmony series. The current rereads are
a response to the fact that she is coming out witha new book in the series in May.
And, of course, I love
that series. The first reread – okay. The second reread, procrastination my
friends.
Jayne Castle doesn’t
procrastinate. The author is actually Jayne Ann Krentz. She writes historical
paranormal romance as Amanda Quick – love, love, love. She writes contemporary
paranormal romance as Jayne Ann Krentz – again with the love. She writes futuristic
paranormal romance as Jayne Castle – I think the rereads attest to the love.
Paranormal the Krentz way
is not vampires or demons or werewolves. No. It’s people who have developed
additional powers. For example, on Harmony, people can summon “ghosts” (not
real ghosts just a deathly form of energy). They can set illusion traps which
will scramble your wits if triggered.
And they have dust bunnies
as pets. Castle describes them as looking like a wad of dryer lint with eyes.
The dust bunnies have names and personalities. For example, dust bunny Elvis
has a cape and dark sunglasses and eats peanut butter with banana sandwiches.
They are also fierce little predators who have a second pair of eyes in the
back of their heads that come out when they think their human is in danger. In
which case, they will use their six little paws to scurry up a villains body so
they can bite their jugular vein.
One wonders, were those
pets fueled by Castle finding dust bunnies under her bed? We may never know.
This author doesn’t have a lot of time for interviews since, at seventy-five
years of age she still puts out three books a year; one Quick, one Krentz and
one Castle.
It’s well established that
reading fuels writing. What are other things that further the efforts of
getting a story sorted out and on paper or computer?
I am a lover of trees and
therefore ‘forest bathing’ is definite fuel for my writing. I need a whole
blogpost to cover that subject alone. If you can’t
wait to learn more you can go here and check out what National Geographic has
to say on the topic.
Many great writers have said the only way to write is to sit your butt in your chair and put your fingers on your laptop keys. I wrote more on this in a blogpost titled Don't Wait For Inspiration. Go here for that blogpost.
A lot of writers will tell you walking helps. The theory is that if your story isn’t moving, one solution is to move your body.
Charles Dickens said about
walking: “If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish.”
Statistics agree with him. If you walk three times a week, forty minutes each time, the part of your brain that is associated with memory and planning increases in size.
Rebecca Solnit, author of
the book Wanderlust; A History Of Walking said: “Thinking is generally thought
of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard
to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something
closest to doing nothing is walking.”
I’ve recently started
intentionally walking for different purposes. It would be nice if moving my
novel along was a side benefit. That would require thinking about my novel in progress while I'm walking. I would have to think about what I'm writing instead of what I'm reading as I put one foot in front of the other.
That would be more easily done if I give up on
my second reread of the Harmony series. But, but, but…
