topics: |  essays | literature | biography | india | diaspora

A fascinatingly constructed fable or meta-story about stories.  The story is
about how stories live in the Ocean of the stream of stories, in the land of
Alifbay.

Extracts

There 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... 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. Black
smoke poured out of the chimneys of the sadness factories and hung
over the city like bad news.		-p.1 opening lines
[In this city lived a professional storyteller named Rashid Khalifa and his
son Haroun...]

What's the use of stories that aren't even true? Haroun couldn't get
the terrible question out of his head.	-p.20

If you try to rush or zoom/ you are sure to meet your doom
All the dangerous overtakers/ end up safe at undertaker's
Look out! slow down! don't be funny/ Life is precious! Cars cost money!
If from speed you get your thrill/ Take precaution - make your will
		- Strange warnings on bus ticket office -p.31/35

P2C2E: Process Too Complicated To Explain		-p.57

He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand
thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different
colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of
breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the streams
of story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single
tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of
stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many more
that were still in the process of being invented could be found here,
the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in
the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form,
they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of
themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other
stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams
of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but
alive.			-p.72

Peace broke out.	-p.191