Shelter-In-Place Reading Roundup: From Kahani to Faerie
An Ancient Mappe of Fairyland (detail) by Bernard Sleigh, 1917
I’m going to have to come up with another name for these reading roundup posts soon. No, the world still isn’t completely back to normal, but I got vaccinated two months ago, and my city may be the first in the U.S. to reach herd immunity, and I really have no idea what the rest of the summer or the year or the decade holds for me, but whatever I’m doing now, I can no longer be said to be “sheltering in place”.
Still, I have some catch-up blog posts to write, and in this one, I wanted to pair two works that I see as sort of bookending (no pun intended) my Shelter-in-Place Era. Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a reread of a beloved favorite from my tween years, which I picked up in late April 2020 after a period of six weeks where I was mentally incapable of reading anything at all. (This is my best evidence of how in the early days of quarantine, I really felt like I was losing my mind. It is the longest I have gone in my entire life without finishing a book.) And Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, which I read a bit more than a year later, a tattered paperback from my nearest Little Free Library — a serendipitous thing, perhaps, to pick up this book about a young man who leaves his little village and has adventures in the wide world of Faerie, just as I too started to be able to venture into the wider world.
There are other good reasons to pair these books in this post: Rushdie and Gaiman belong to the same generation (bookending the Baby Boom years just as these novels bookended my Shelter in Place period), and they share a love of flamboyant, fantastical storytelling deeply informed by their knowledge of earlier folklore and literature.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
For the first few weeks of California's shelter-in-place I could barely read a thing, so I thought a return to a childhood favorite might be in order. Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories has enchanted me since I was 12 years old and discovered it in a bed-and-breakfast atop a mountain in Southern Oregon. One concern when an award-winning literary novelist writes a children's fantasy-adventure and gets all his famous friends (from Stephen King to Mario Vargas Llosa) to blurb it, is that adults will like it better than kids will. But I can attest that when I was a discerning tween-age connoisseur of YA fantasy novels, Haroun quickly became one of my favorites. Besides, even Rushdie's adult novels have an outsize share of exuberance and whimsy — qualities he carried over to this book.
This time through, my first in a decade, what struck me the most is how much Haroun feels like watching a really good animated cartoon. Even scenes that take place in the "real" world, before Haroun begins his fantastical journey to the moon Kahani, are written in an exaggerated style that makes me picture the characters as cartoons rather than realistic-looking people. For instance, this description of a busy bus terminal:
There was a wrestling match at the ticket window instead of a queue, because everyone wanted to be first; and as most people were carrying chickens or children or other bulky items, the result was a free-for-all out of which feathers and toys and dislodged hats kept flying. And from time to time some dizzy fellow with ripped clothes would burst out of the mêlée, triumphantly waving a little scrap of paper: his ticket!
Can't you just see the cartoon whirlwind of flying feathers?
I began this latest reread of Haroun simply because I wanted a delightful, nostalgic, achievable read in these pandemic times. Only later did I realize the deeper resonances, why I maybe needed to return to this particular childhood favorite right now. I was suffering from situational depression and reader's block — this is a book about a boy who goes on a quest to cure his depressed father's writer's block. I am stuck at home, uncertain of when I'll get to see friends or family again — this is the first book that Rushdie published after the fatwa was issued against him, as a present for the young son he could no longer see in person. Like many writers, I wonder about the value of art in a time when truth seems stranger than fiction — this book argues that what makes us most human is our capacity for imagination and self-expression and enjoying "stories that aren't even true."
Stardust by Neil GaimanMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Stardust is a real charmer, an adult fairy tale full of enchanting and eerie descriptions that will appeal to anyone who spent their youth devouring books like The Neverending Story . It is droll but never cynical; romantic in the medieval sense more than the modern one. I also enjoyed how it ends on a quiet and bittersweet note, rather than the fantasy-adventure cliché of a noisy battle between good and evil. It’s that bittersweetness, and not just the sex scene in the first chapter, that I think really qualifies this as a fairy tale for adults. But for the most part it also offers the simple and timeless pleasures of an evocative story told by a master storyteller.