Xembla, Zenda, Xanadu

Alas, google has failed me.  It did not have the answer to the question of what these three words refer to.  I did learn that if you put the first letter of each line together it spells out the name of the author's son, but as for the words themselves the mystery lingers.  I believe Xembla has something to do with Vladimir Nabokov and his novel Pale Fire, at least there's an entire site dedicated to Xembla, but it never does define it.  And poor wikipedia tells us that it's a dutch television site.  Zenda was a little easier to find.  It refers to the novel The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope- which IMdb describes as a swashbuckling romance (it was made into a film in 1937), incidentally the entire novel is available as an ebook for free at project gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/95.  This leaves me with Xanadu and all I can think of is the classic film by that same name and starring Olivia Newton John which I know that we all love to hate, but I have a feeling that it might be related to Samual Taylor Coleridges poem which begins: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree."  So there we have it, the answer is: these three words are three fictional lands from three different authors.

Haroun in Wonderland

What a fabulous story!  Throughout the entire novel I felt as though I had fallen through the rabbit hole.  Images of Alice in Wonderland kept popping in my mind and it's novels like this that make me wish I was a painter.  Alas I am just a humble reader trying to answer that ever present question: "What's the use of stories that aren't even true?"  In Haroun's case it was the loss of his father's storytelling abilities that started him on his journey and propelled him to succeed in returning inspiration to said father.  The loss of stories created not only despair but an eternal night, while the reintroduction of stories created a psychedelic world of color and light.  Which coincedentaly is the point of stories that aren't even true.  They bring color to our imagination and light our way in the darkest of times.