- Paperback: 192 pages
- Publisher: Flamingo; (Reissue) edition (16 Nov 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0006543898
- ISBN-13: 978-0006543893
- Product Dimensions: 17.3 x 10.9 x 1.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 255,149 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
A richly braided recollection of family and friends, culture and recent history. Daughter of Pakistan's eminent, impetuous journalist Z.A. Suleri and a Welsh teacher of English literature ("My mother would not do without Jane Austen"), Sara Suleri grew up during the "trying times" following independence in 1947 when the government's Meatless Days policy was foiled by a butcher/housewife conspiracy. Writing about those charged years when her family changed addresses as her father searched for political solutions, she is generous with anecdotes and skillful in sharing significances: how food and customs bound women together, for example, or how adult discoveries - sweetbreads, a delicacy, were really testicles - refined those bonds. Moving through Lahore streets that "wind absentmindedly between centuries," she contemplates a college friend who arrived without instincts from East Africa; limns a sister's "stance of wild inquiry"; and regards with distant sympathy her father's perpetual quest for the country's path. In an especially affecting chapter, she considers her mother's singular position as an outsider in a nearly feudal culture ("a guest in her own name") and attempts to stake out "the possible location of her inattention." Suleri approaches these several lives - and her own, as a darker sister - by theme rather than chronology, imaginatively moving from childhood impressions ("My aunts smell like my mother") to dreams to adult perceptions - a bounty of phrases, images, metaphors. And as she travels to England (as a child) and Yale (where she now teaches Third World literature), she never loses her power to astonish. (Kirkus Reviews)
Product Description
Sara Suleri’s outstanding, critically acclaimed (and prize-winning) memoir of life in Lahore.
‘A tour de force of memory and interpretation…What makes Meatless Days such an astonishing book is its corrosive effect on partitions of all kinds – between body and history, politics and poetry, language and experience, the East and the West. Suleri seems to find nourishment in the most indigestible truths. Beware her prose at its most luscious: cunningly – appetizingly– enfolded in a mango leaf, a mouthful of stones awaits.’ Village Voice
‘A linguistic triumph…it can be recommended not only for the intricacy and fluidity of its language but also for the finely drawn portrait of Pakistan in the traumatic early years of its inception.’ JO-ANN GOODWIN, City Limits
‘An extraordinary first book. The reader retains a sensation of infinite sadness at losses so irreplaceable that life seems bleached of possibilities. As an evocation of family love, with all its sharpness, pain and need, Meatless Days is almost faultless.’ CAROLINE MOOREHEAD, New Statesman
‘A super-subtle book with a surgical intellectual frankness and a poetic precision which crisps the reader into paying absolute attention.’ CANDIA MCWILLIAM, London Review of Books
‘Worthwhile reading? Very. It is unique’ RUMER GODDEN, Daily Telegraph
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First Sentence
Leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of women. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of women. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I looked briefly at the one-star reviews of this book, and for a moment wondered if they had read a different book. This book was wonderful. I read it at the end of a several-month visit to India, while I was in Calcutta. Having read and written (in university and during my visit) about other contemporary authors dealing with the subcontinent's history and weaving it together with their personal histories in novels, essays, and other works--Rushdie, Seth, Desai, etc.--I still found Suleri utterly original and provacative. One of these reviews uses the word 'incomprehensible'; Suleri's articulate and sometimes absolutely perfect sentences are much less deserving of the term than the review itself. Read it again--you missed something.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Sara Suleri's command on the English language is of course quite clear from the first page. She is among the few contemporary writers who dare to use difficult words without feeling apologetic about looking 'prententious." Bravo! Of course the words are used very appropriately as well. We need a revival of good English usage -- after all what's the point of testing kids on SATs.
Among South Asian writers she is a rare breed to balance a love for their homeland with candid criticism (unlike the much too celebrated Rushdie or Roy). She is an intellectual in the highest tradiation -- it is no wonder that a University Press published this book instead of some market-frenzied publishing house.
I disagree with some of her irreverent portrayal of Muslim society and traditional values but that is all tempered by the sardonic cadence of the work.
Hope you will write a novel as well.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I found whole sentences, paragraphs, incomprehensible. I just don't understand her and what she is trying to get at.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Utter Dissapointment
Ms Suleri perhaps falls victim to high expectations. Instead of trying to be her own self she wants to maintain B. Read more
Published on 11 Sep 1998
Utter Dissapointment
Ms Suleri perhaps falls victim to high expectations. Instead of trying to be her own self she wants to maintain B. Read more
Published on 11 Sep 1998
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