Meatless Days: A Memoir (Flamingo S.) - Softcover

Suleri, Sara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006543898 ISBN 13: 9780006543893

Publisher: Flamingo, 1998

Synopsis

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

About this title

Product Description:

Meatless Days A remarkable writer offers a remarkable look at the violent history of Pakistan's independence with the author's most intimate memories--of her Welsh mother, an English teacher of spare, abstracted eloquence; of her Pakistani father, a prominent and frequently jailed political journalist; of her tenacious grandmother; and of the friends who accompany her own passage to the West. A profoundly movin Full description

Review:

"Dazzling. . . . For with her own recognition that history is not the exclusive property of her father's copperplates, Suleri has set herself loose, a Proust in Pakistan, to wander among her own several lives."--Henry Louis Gates Jr. "Voice Literary Supplement " ""Meatless Days" takes the reader through a Third World that will surprise and confound him even as it records the author's similar perplexities while coming to terms with the West. Those voyages Suleri narrates in great strings of words and images so rich that they left this reader, at least, alternately sated and hungering for more."--Ron Grossman "Chicago Tribune " "Suleri has chosen to take the fragments of a life, and related lives, into her palm, shake them, spread them out, then gather them up and give them another shake, as if she were playing with a kaleidoscope. . . . They are like the patterns carved out of lapis lazuli and agate, onyx and opal, set in the marble of Moghul tombs."--Anita Desai, "Washington Post Book World " Dazzling. . . . For with her own recognition that history is not the exclusive property of her father s copperplates, Suleri has set herself loose, a Proust in Pakistan, to wander among her own several lives. --Henry Louis Gates Jr. "Voice Literary Supplement "" Suleri has chosen to take the fragments of a life, and related lives, into her palm, shake them, spread them out, then gather them up and give them another shake, as if she were playing with a kaleidoscope. . . . They are like the patterns carved out of lapis lazuli and agate, onyx and opal, set in the marble of Moghul tombs. --Anita Desai, "Washington Post Book World "" "Meatless Days" takes the reader through a Third World that will surprise and confound him even as it records the author s similar perplexities while coming to terms with the West. Those voyages Suleri narrates in great strings of words and images so rich that they left this reader, at least, alternately sated and hungering for more. --Ron Grossman "Chicago Tribune "" "A jewel of insight and beauty." --Rone Tempest "Los Angeles Times Book Review " "[Meatless Days] is, ultimately, a book of loss. The deaths of Suleri's mother and sister form the heart of this memoir; every moment is refracted through a lens of pain. . . . For all the verbal panache and structural ingenuity of Meatless Days, the final words I say about it must be this: I have never read a finer depiction of the fierceness of sibling love." --Kamila Shamsie"Independent" (04/08/2005) "A jewel of insight and beauty." --Rone Tempest "Los Angeles Times Book Review " "Meatless Days takes the reader through a Third World that will surprise and confound him even as it records the author's similar perplexities while coming to terms with the West. Those voyages Suleri narrates in great strings of words and images so rich that they left this reader, at least, alternately sated and hungering for more."--Ron Grossman "Chicago Tribune " A jewel of insight and beauty. --Rone Tempest "Los Angeles Times Book Review "" A jewel of insight and beauty. --Rone Tempest "Los Angeles Times Book Review "" "["Meatless Days"] is, ultimately, a book of loss. The deaths of Suleri's mother and sister form the heart of this memoir; every moment is refracted through a lens of pain. . . . For all the verbal panache and structural ingenuity of "Meatless Days," the final words I say about it must be this: I have never read a finer depiction of the fierceness of sibling love." --Kamila Shamsie"Independent" (04/08/2005) "A jewel of insight and beauty." --Rone Tempest "Los Angeles Times Book Review " "A jewel of insight and beauty." --Rone Tempest "Los Angeles Times Book Review "

About this edition

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0006543898
• ISBN 13: 9780006543893
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192