Meatless Days - Hardcover

Suleri

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226779807 ISBN 13: 9780226779805

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1989

Synopsis

In this finely wrought memoir of life in postcolonial Pakistan, Suleri intertwines the violent history of Pakistan's independence with her own most intimate memories—of her Welsh mother; of her Pakistani father, prominent political journalist Z.A. Suleri; of her tenacious grandmother Dadi and five siblings; and of her own passage to the West.

"Nine autobiographical tales that move easily back and forth among Pakistan, Britain, and the United States. . . . She forays lightly into Pakistani history, and deeply
into the history of her family and friends. . . . The Suleri women at home in Pakistan make this book sing."—Daniel Wolfe, New York Times Book Review

"A jewel of insight and beauty. . . . Suleri's voice has the same authority when she speaks about Pakistani politics as it does in her literary interludes."—Rone Tempest, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"The author has a gift for rendering her family with a few, deft strokes, turning them out as whole and complete as eggs."—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 . . . hungering for more."—Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune

"Dazzling. . . . Suleri is a postcolonial Proust to Rushdie's phantasmagorical Pynchon."—Henry Louise Gates, Jr., Voice Literary Supplement

About this title

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 "

From the Back Cover

"This is virtuoso self-expression. It makes a daunting literary debut."
CLIVE FISHER, 'Financial Times'

"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.

"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 MOORHEAD, 'New Statesman.'

"A super-subtle book... Suleri writes with a surgical frankness, and combines a slightly distorted syntactical elegance with an unusual clarity of diction. Dislocation makes for a poetic precision which crisps the reader into paying absolute attention."
CANDIDA MCWILLIAM, 'London Review of Books.'

"Worthwhile reading? Very. It is unique."
RUMER GODDEN, 'Daily Telegraph.'

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226779807
• ISBN 13: 9780226779805
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192