A storyteller with keen imagination and startling turns of phrase, a nuanced grasp of human bondage and knifelike measure of love
Farooki references Icarus, Wilde and Peter Pan to chart the trajectory of a man in flight (partly inspired by Farooki’s father, ‘compelled to make things interesting as gamblers do’)—the soaring and the falling, the running and the corralling. So if there’s audacity in the enterprise he makes of life, there’s an appalling, appealing, indecency in it too. And heartbreak, particularly in the indignity of the ‘banal conclusion’: refusing to grow up, he grows old, more alone than free.
An operatic, tender and dry-eyed treatment of the runaway impulse, of abandonment, of love’s inadequacy, by a storyteller with keen imagination and startling turns of phrase, a nuanced grasp of human bondage and knifelike measure of love (described as ‘A hard, shining fact...like pearls of teeth set in gums, vulnerable and vicious all at once’).