gandarapaulycastillo

[gandarapaulycastillo]

Between Clay and Dust

Between clay and Dust tell the story of two

characters: an aged wrestler who's struggling with the passing down of his title to his brother, and a beautiful prostitute with a prestigious past, both living in a small city in Pakistan, both coming to terms with the slow decay of their power.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi (born 26 July 1968) is a Pakistani-Canadian author, translator, and storyteller. Farooqi was among the five writers shortlisted for Asia's most prestigious literary prize in 2012.[1] In addition to his fiction and translation projects, he is working on establishing an Urdu language publishing program specializing in children's literature and classics. He founded the publishing house KITAB (2012), launched the online index Urdu Thesaurus (2016), and designed the interactive storytelling and reading initiative STORYKIT Program (2016). These three projects have been integrated in an activity-based learning program for children

A finalist for the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize

"The book works like an ache in the heart.... A story that purports to be about decay resounds with the stuff of life. This is a book to be savored like a fine single malt."

—Forbes India

"A crisp and elegiac novel….Farooqi’s atmospheric prose is spare and lucid."

The Hero

In a ruined city after the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Ustad Ramzi is still famed as a wrestler of unparalleled strength and technique

Musharraf Ali Farooqi is the angel of history. The storm called progress is blowing him into the future. It is piling wreckage at his feet, but there is so much to be done between clay and dust: as this marvelous novel shows, language is to be practiced with the rigor of style; gesture supported by graciousness; ordinary life to be rescued by ritual; and nostalgia distilled into knowledge."

A crisp and elegiac novel….Farooqi’s atmospheric prose is spare and lucid."

Farooqi’s spare prose, his deliberate understatedness makes his work as much about what it doesn’t say as what it does…. The book works like an ache in the heart, evoking cultures and values that, while not necessarily perfect, represented something larger than the self; their replacements, by contrast, are small and mean…. The pages come alive with the grunts of the trainee pehelwans and capture the last echoes of Gohar Jan’s sitar. A story that purports to be about decay resounds with the stuff of life. This is a book to be savoured like a fine single malt.”

Farooqi traces the unravelling of their world with near-uncanny attentiveness….Farooqi’s narrative voice is cool and hypnotic… Farooqi’s true victory in this book is Ustad Ramzi, a patriarch who evokes both our sympathy and our discomfort. His sins may seem smaller than those of a society rushing headlong into the future, but Farooqi’s writing is too wise and too elegant to make this a romance instead of a tragedy. As in Syed’s poem, we are left with the notion that every history is underwritten by the minute, private failures of human beings.”