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Meatless Days
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
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
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July 19, 2023
Here is a phrase that comes to mind when I think of Sara Suleri’s Meatless days: complete gibberish. If that’s not effective enough, here is another one: absolute twaddle.
I’d try to convince you that the book wasn’t really all that bad, but then I’d just be straight out lying. Never have I ever spent more time questioning my own reading habits than when I was reading this endless text of drivel and pointlessness. At one point I started reading it only at night before bedtime, so highly was it guaranteed to make me fall asleep.
“It’s non-fiction, it’s not meant to excite,” I soothed my bored, frustrated soul, but even that wasn’t consolation enough. Suleri is writing about her family, about postcolonial Pakistan and the effects of migration on the wandering soul, and the only reason I know this is because I read the frankly incredibly misleading blurb. Because nowhere in the book does anything actually make any sense. Take, for example, exhibit A:
Sometimes, when I feel burdened by this baldest prose - I lived too long with the man of the hairless head - tyrannized by the structure of a simple sentence, it does me good to recollect how quietly my mother measured out her dealings with impossible edges.
Um, what the what now?
The insufferable part of this inexplicable prose is that the WHOLE. DAMN. BOOK is like this. Literally just sentences composed of words strung together to mean god knows what. Some parts make sudden, startling sense so that you are deluded into thinking AHA, i DO know the english language, I can do this. But then Suleri gets worried. Did she drop her metaphorical, allegorical, and utterly incomprehensible rambling for more than two sentences? Abort text! Revert to pretentiousness!
Interestingly enough, it is precisely this ostentatious writing that the blurb tries to sell. Even besides the writing, there are nine randomly placed chapters of absolutely no order or arrangement in this book. And what I want to know is, what was the editor thinking? Or more to the point, who was the editor of this unbelievably dreary piece of writing? So many questions I have after reading this book, none of which I really care to find the answers to, because the best way to deal with this book is to consciously remove it from your memory and pretend you didn’t actually read it, for fear of regret for all those wasted hours.
And if you think I’m being too harsh, consider exhibit B:
In our early years, those most intensely talkable, Dale and I so savoured the taste of articulating ourselves in each other’s presence that we rarely conversed outside the splendid way life unfolds itself to its most prized audience.
Now what is that saying? What does that even mean? The only possible responses to this book are yawning, rereading of a single line of the text multiple times, or an urgent desire to fling the book through an open window as far away from you as you can. The only times my eyes opened was when Suleri would mention a famous political figure, someone whom the bored recesses of my mind would recognize and struggle to latch onto in a desperate bid to stay awake, but sadly even those moments were few and far between. Even though the author’s father was Ziauddin Ahmed Suleri (1913-1999), a prominent political journalist in the subcontinent as well as activist of the Pakistan movement, the book manages to stay very, very boring. And I’m so very bored of it that I’m going to stop talking about it now, and hope to never have to relive these days again.
Recommendation
Unless you are particularly interested in pointless tosh, don’t.
**
I review Pakistani Fiction, and talk about Pakistani fiction, and want to talk to people who like to talk about fiction (Pakistani and otherwise, take your pick.) To read more reviews or just contact me so you can talk about books, check out my Blog or follow me on Twitter!
I’d try to convince you that the book wasn’t really all that bad, but then I’d just be straight out lying. Never have I ever spent more time questioning my own reading habits than when I was reading this endless text of drivel and pointlessness. At one point I started reading it only at night before bedtime, so highly was it guaranteed to make me fall asleep.
“It’s non-fiction, it’s not meant to excite,” I soothed my bored, frustrated soul, but even that wasn’t consolation enough. Suleri is writing about her family, about postcolonial Pakistan and the effects of migration on the wandering soul, and the only reason I know this is because I read the frankly incredibly misleading blurb. Because nowhere in the book does anything actually make any sense. Take, for example, exhibit A:
Sometimes, when I feel burdened by this baldest prose - I lived too long with the man of the hairless head - tyrannized by the structure of a simple sentence, it does me good to recollect how quietly my mother measured out her dealings with impossible edges.
Um, what the what now?
The insufferable part of this inexplicable prose is that the WHOLE. DAMN. BOOK is like this. Literally just sentences composed of words strung together to mean god knows what. Some parts make sudden, startling sense so that you are deluded into thinking AHA, i DO know the english language, I can do this. But then Suleri gets worried. Did she drop her metaphorical, allegorical, and utterly incomprehensible rambling for more than two sentences? Abort text! Revert to pretentiousness!
Interestingly enough, it is precisely this ostentatious writing that the blurb tries to sell. Even besides the writing, there are nine randomly placed chapters of absolutely no order or arrangement in this book. And what I want to know is, what was the editor thinking? Or more to the point, who was the editor of this unbelievably dreary piece of writing? So many questions I have after reading this book, none of which I really care to find the answers to, because the best way to deal with this book is to consciously remove it from your memory and pretend you didn’t actually read it, for fear of regret for all those wasted hours.
And if you think I’m being too harsh, consider exhibit B:
In our early years, those most intensely talkable, Dale and I so savoured the taste of articulating ourselves in each other’s presence that we rarely conversed outside the splendid way life unfolds itself to its most prized audience.
Now what is that saying? What does that even mean? The only possible responses to this book are yawning, rereading of a single line of the text multiple times, or an urgent desire to fling the book through an open window as far away from you as you can. The only times my eyes opened was when Suleri would mention a famous political figure, someone whom the bored recesses of my mind would recognize and struggle to latch onto in a desperate bid to stay awake, but sadly even those moments were few and far between. Even though the author’s father was Ziauddin Ahmed Suleri (1913-1999), a prominent political journalist in the subcontinent as well as activist of the Pakistan movement, the book manages to stay very, very boring. And I’m so very bored of it that I’m going to stop talking about it now, and hope to never have to relive these days again.
Recommendation
Unless you are particularly interested in pointless tosh, don’t.
**
I review Pakistani Fiction, and talk about Pakistani fiction, and want to talk to people who like to talk about fiction (Pakistani and otherwise, take your pick.) To read more reviews or just contact me so you can talk about books, check out my Blog or follow me on Twitter!
April 2, 2018
Suleri twists the English language in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways; perhaps this is linked to her bilingualism, as she mentioned in one of her stories, her bilingualism, especially in languages are distinct as Urdu and English, has caused a kind of intellectual schizophrenia; unable to express herself clearly in either language, her literature coalesces the idioms and idiosyncrasies of both to create a rich and vibrant style which reverberates with poetry of Urdu and flexibility of English; both Urdu and English are, after all, bastard languages and mixtures of various, often completely different languages.
‘Meatless Days’ is a biographical portrait of Suleri’s family; her politically minded and liberal father and her Welsh mother as well as her siblings and grandmother. Beneath all of this is a sense of grief; grief at the untimely death of her mother and sister, grief at the barriers which separate her form her siblings, grief the the slow descent of Pakistan into military and increasingly intolerant dictatorship, grief at existing in two worlds, both East and West, within which she not entirely comfortable and does not fit in. Yet beneath all of this is an understanding and tolerance of human frailties and idiosyncrasies;
“I like to imagine that there is space for improvident angels, the ones who wish to get away from too much light. There, a company of Ifat Ilie, arms across their foreheads, such an intensely familiar thought that it brings tears of delight to the grave eyes of god.”
Yet beneath this darkness shines the light of human relationships. Of Sara’s with her bellicose grandmother, of Sara’s parents, separate by differing cultures but brought together by an intense emotional connection, of her childhood closeness with her younger brother before a wall of aloofness separates them. Entwined within Sara’s sadness is on the loss of these connections and relationships and of the ability of art to, however superficially, recapture these, the recapture the colours and cadences of the people who pass through our lives and enrich them, or even of the silent contemplation of Lahore, with it’s vibrancy and noises from above;
“I who loved the jut of his lower lip was quite content to be up there in silence, sweating in an illicit sky, and watching my friend T.K formulate and reformulate sentences I knew he would never say. Down on the ground there was too much chatter anyway, so it established a poignancy of comradeship between us, all that machinery and silence….What puzzled her was the city’s habit of behaving like a mirage, it’s Cheshire Cat’s ability to disappear.”
Indeed it is Suleri’s ability to interweave the mirage like images within her narrative, to bring out the idiosyncrasies of her characters, to construct her weird sentences which lends strength to her novel and imbues it with vitality and verve.
‘Meatless Days’ is a biographical portrait of Suleri’s family; her politically minded and liberal father and her Welsh mother as well as her siblings and grandmother. Beneath all of this is a sense of grief; grief at the untimely death of her mother and sister, grief at the barriers which separate her form her siblings, grief the the slow descent of Pakistan into military and increasingly intolerant dictatorship, grief at existing in two worlds, both East and West, within which she not entirely comfortable and does not fit in. Yet beneath all of this is an understanding and tolerance of human frailties and idiosyncrasies;
“I like to imagine that there is space for improvident angels, the ones who wish to get away from too much light. There, a company of Ifat Ilie, arms across their foreheads, such an intensely familiar thought that it brings tears of delight to the grave eyes of god.”
Yet beneath this darkness shines the light of human relationships. Of Sara’s with her bellicose grandmother, of Sara’s parents, separate by differing cultures but brought together by an intense emotional connection, of her childhood closeness with her younger brother before a wall of aloofness separates them. Entwined within Sara’s sadness is on the loss of these connections and relationships and of the ability of art to, however superficially, recapture these, the recapture the colours and cadences of the people who pass through our lives and enrich them, or even of the silent contemplation of Lahore, with it’s vibrancy and noises from above;
“I who loved the jut of his lower lip was quite content to be up there in silence, sweating in an illicit sky, and watching my friend T.K formulate and reformulate sentences I knew he would never say. Down on the ground there was too much chatter anyway, so it established a poignancy of comradeship between us, all that machinery and silence….What puzzled her was the city’s habit of behaving like a mirage, it’s Cheshire Cat’s ability to disappear.”
Indeed it is Suleri’s ability to interweave the mirage like images within her narrative, to bring out the idiosyncrasies of her characters, to construct her weird sentences which lends strength to her novel and imbues it with vitality and verve.
April 23, 2018
“When I teach topics in third world literature, much time is lost in trying to explain that the third world is locatable only as a discourse of convenience. Trying to find it is like pretending that history or home is real and not located precisely where you are sitting, I hear my voice quite idiotically say.”
You might want to spend a few minutes reading and reading this statement, and then trying to ‘unpack’ or decode what Suleri is trying to say. If you aren’t interested in working hard for meaning, you probably shouldn’t even bother reading this book. It’s not about the length - because it is not even 200 pages long, but it took me weeks of careful reading to conquer it. (Yes, the verb ‘conquer’ feels like the right word; this book is definitely a challenge.) In Kamila Shamsie’s Introduction, she warns that the sentences in Meatless Days are “always intelligent, always elegant, sometimes baffling,” and having finally finished this most unusual of memoirs, I would definitely agree. I was often pleased by Suleri’s writing, but it is almost never easy to figure out what she is talking about. Her narrative line is rarely straightforward, and she has a tendency to bend and distort metaphors to the point of obscurity, confusion and even meaninglessness. (I assume they mean something to her, but her analogies will be lost on the average reader.)
If she has written a twisty memoir, notable for its obfuscation, perhaps it is because Suleri does not find ‘identity’ or ‘culture’ or ‘home’ an easy thing to define. Child of a Welsh mother and a Pakistani father, Suleri was born into a house divided by languages and culture. Her father was a prominent journalist, whose life’s work was defining and helping to ‘bring into being’ the Islamic Pakistan that was created in 1947. Her mother, meanwhile, was teaching writers like Jane Austen at the university in Lahore. Her paternal grandmother Dadi was a native of India, a speaker of Urdu and not the Punjabi tongue which predominated in Lahore. As a further complication, Suleri is writing her memoir from several degrees of displacement: as a resident of New Haven, Connecticut, and as someone who has lost several of the important women (grandmother, mother, sister) who helped define ‘home’ for her.
Although my own cultural dislocations are not nearly as intense as Suleri’s, I did read this book (mostly) as I was visiting my ‘native home’ of Texas. (I have lived in England for many years, and can entirely understand the feeling of belonging to neither place -but somehow being permanently displaced.). I can also very much relate to the grief and feelings of loss which permeate the book. It’s a memoir told in a series of character sketches, and as Suleri gets to the end (or more accurately the core) - those being the chapters relating to her sister Ifat and her mother - she builds an emotional momentum that had me finally connecting with her writing. I never could completely decide, though, if the book was beautiful or entirely too inpenetrable. Most reviews seem to be either 5 stars or 1; but I am settling for the ambivalence of 3 stars.
Note: I read the recently released Penguin paperback which is part of the ‘Women Writers’ series. Thanks for very much to Penguin Books for this book.
You might want to spend a few minutes reading and reading this statement, and then trying to ‘unpack’ or decode what Suleri is trying to say. If you aren’t interested in working hard for meaning, you probably shouldn’t even bother reading this book. It’s not about the length - because it is not even 200 pages long, but it took me weeks of careful reading to conquer it. (Yes, the verb ‘conquer’ feels like the right word; this book is definitely a challenge.) In Kamila Shamsie’s Introduction, she warns that the sentences in Meatless Days are “always intelligent, always elegant, sometimes baffling,” and having finally finished this most unusual of memoirs, I would definitely agree. I was often pleased by Suleri’s writing, but it is almost never easy to figure out what she is talking about. Her narrative line is rarely straightforward, and she has a tendency to bend and distort metaphors to the point of obscurity, confusion and even meaninglessness. (I assume they mean something to her, but her analogies will be lost on the average reader.)
If she has written a twisty memoir, notable for its obfuscation, perhaps it is because Suleri does not find ‘identity’ or ‘culture’ or ‘home’ an easy thing to define. Child of a Welsh mother and a Pakistani father, Suleri was born into a house divided by languages and culture. Her father was a prominent journalist, whose life’s work was defining and helping to ‘bring into being’ the Islamic Pakistan that was created in 1947. Her mother, meanwhile, was teaching writers like Jane Austen at the university in Lahore. Her paternal grandmother Dadi was a native of India, a speaker of Urdu and not the Punjabi tongue which predominated in Lahore. As a further complication, Suleri is writing her memoir from several degrees of displacement: as a resident of New Haven, Connecticut, and as someone who has lost several of the important women (grandmother, mother, sister) who helped define ‘home’ for her.
Although my own cultural dislocations are not nearly as intense as Suleri’s, I did read this book (mostly) as I was visiting my ‘native home’ of Texas. (I have lived in England for many years, and can entirely understand the feeling of belonging to neither place -but somehow being permanently displaced.). I can also very much relate to the grief and feelings of loss which permeate the book. It’s a memoir told in a series of character sketches, and as Suleri gets to the end (or more accurately the core) - those being the chapters relating to her sister Ifat and her mother - she builds an emotional momentum that had me finally connecting with her writing. I never could completely decide, though, if the book was beautiful or entirely too inpenetrable. Most reviews seem to be either 5 stars or 1; but I am settling for the ambivalence of 3 stars.
Note: I read the recently released Penguin paperback which is part of the ‘Women Writers’ series. Thanks for very much to Penguin Books for this book.
Read
November 12, 2022What a thing it is to discover a good book decades after it has been written! I wonder why nobody told me to read Sara Suleri's 'Meatless Days' before? There were so many South Asian, especially diasporic, novels discussed over the last twenty years but not once did I hear anyone say: if you just want to look at good writing -- experimental writing that defies assumptions of genre -- read 'Meatless Days'. I am both moved and startled by it. Some of the sentences are of such a sensory quality that I find myself wanting to lick them off the page (I don't actually do that. I don't! Really, I don't!). The language is a felt one, communicating itself with such a sharp metaphorical edge at times, it is like a new flavour on the tongue; at other times, it engages my literary senses with a sweet viscosity.
On the other hand, I am glad that I did not read this book before I wrote my own 'Bread, Cement, Cactus' for it may have influenced the style in which I attempted a memoir of belonging and home, and this would not have been a good thing. Suleri's book is, in its own way, a sort of reaching for home but I needed to write a very different kind of memoir. I needed to grasp home as a sociocultural and political concept rather than reach for it within my own heart.
Suleri wrote a memoir that does something other than giving us a story about a well-known person, that opening of social doors and letting secrets spill, or even an account of living in a particular place at a particular time, taking us on a journey with a character with all their trials. Instead, it tells us what an emotional life is constructed of, using emotional tools that must be fashioned with one's own hands and memories so that, in the end, we are left with the author's heart rather than an account of her days. It is a memoir of love, not an account of relationships but a cloudy distillate in memory.
I did get tripped up sometimes by the language of the academic that sits within the writer. She uses 'discourse' instead of conversation or talk but she uses the term precisely, letting it describe an environment. A person can turn into a discourse, within himself or for the people in his life, or on account of a particular way of living and writing, seeing and refusing to see. She uses the word casually, but conscious of its possibilities. It is a pity she didn't write more fiction; I would have liked to see what she did with it but perhaps it is just as well. I think I will look out for her other book, also a personal narrative by the sound of it.
On the other hand, I am glad that I did not read this book before I wrote my own 'Bread, Cement, Cactus' for it may have influenced the style in which I attempted a memoir of belonging and home, and this would not have been a good thing. Suleri's book is, in its own way, a sort of reaching for home but I needed to write a very different kind of memoir. I needed to grasp home as a sociocultural and political concept rather than reach for it within my own heart.
Suleri wrote a memoir that does something other than giving us a story about a well-known person, that opening of social doors and letting secrets spill, or even an account of living in a particular place at a particular time, taking us on a journey with a character with all their trials. Instead, it tells us what an emotional life is constructed of, using emotional tools that must be fashioned with one's own hands and memories so that, in the end, we are left with the author's heart rather than an account of her days. It is a memoir of love, not an account of relationships but a cloudy distillate in memory.
I did get tripped up sometimes by the language of the academic that sits within the writer. She uses 'discourse' instead of conversation or talk but she uses the term precisely, letting it describe an environment. A person can turn into a discourse, within himself or for the people in his life, or on account of a particular way of living and writing, seeing and refusing to see. She uses the word casually, but conscious of its possibilities. It is a pity she didn't write more fiction; I would have liked to see what she did with it but perhaps it is just as well. I think I will look out for her other book, also a personal narrative by the sound of it.
March 27, 2020
“Speaking two languages may seem a relative affluence, but more often it entails the problems of maintaining a second establishment even though your body can be in one place at a time. When I return to Urdu, I feel shocked at my own neglect of a space so intimate to me: like relearning the proportions of a once-familiar room, it takes me by surprise to recollect that I need not feel grief, I can eat grief; that I need not bury my mother but instead can offer her into the earth, for I am in Urdu now.”
RATING: 4.5/5
Sara Suleri rejects plot, eschews chronology as she moves in all directions through time and space - from past to present, from newborn Pakistan to Midwest America. This results in a slightly disjointed memoir but it only adds to its richness. The 11 chapters do not make a coherent narrative and they don't need to. Suleri instead provides us with intimate portraits of the people closest to her. These are deep character studies, extended windows into her eventful life. By juxtaposing her own tragic personal history with the nation's, she gives birth to a wildly original memoir.
Her style is incredibly complex, rich and intricate. It is a profound meditation on the ways in which writing and memory overlap and affect each other. In many places, the heavy prose does get bogged down by its excessive abstruseness. It can become quite dense, even pretentious occasionally, but the rewards justify the effort one puts in. Don't go looking for structure, for a unifying vision, or even an ordered account. Sara Suleri's voice fragments itself and takes flight in her attempt to put together a true to life rendering of lived history - piecemeal, a thing of shreds and patches.
RATING: 4.5/5
Sara Suleri rejects plot, eschews chronology as she moves in all directions through time and space - from past to present, from newborn Pakistan to Midwest America. This results in a slightly disjointed memoir but it only adds to its richness. The 11 chapters do not make a coherent narrative and they don't need to. Suleri instead provides us with intimate portraits of the people closest to her. These are deep character studies, extended windows into her eventful life. By juxtaposing her own tragic personal history with the nation's, she gives birth to a wildly original memoir.
Her style is incredibly complex, rich and intricate. It is a profound meditation on the ways in which writing and memory overlap and affect each other. In many places, the heavy prose does get bogged down by its excessive abstruseness. It can become quite dense, even pretentious occasionally, but the rewards justify the effort one puts in. Don't go looking for structure, for a unifying vision, or even an ordered account. Sara Suleri's voice fragments itself and takes flight in her attempt to put together a true to life rendering of lived history - piecemeal, a thing of shreds and patches.
April 10, 2022
had to DNF after the Excellent Things in Women ending because I rolled my eyes so hard that my face is stuck in a permanent spasm now. I had very little against diaspora writers before (because I find the authenticity debate pointless) but now I have a lot more. ban them all.
the entire ordeal felt like I was reading Shashi Tharoor's diary: the vocabulary, the emptiness of the diction, the distance, the class background. I'm so tired of the Gymkhana Woes of the literati. why does all Postcol Lit™ sound like the unceasing drone of The Reluctant Fundamentalist movie narration, now set to the summer heatwave background used in PTV dramas? why does it all sound so slow, so meaningless, so mind-numbingly suburban middle-class domestic?
the entire ordeal felt like I was reading Shashi Tharoor's diary: the vocabulary, the emptiness of the diction, the distance, the class background. I'm so tired of the Gymkhana Woes of the literati. why does all Postcol Lit™ sound like the unceasing drone of The Reluctant Fundamentalist movie narration, now set to the summer heatwave background used in PTV dramas? why does it all sound so slow, so meaningless, so mind-numbingly suburban middle-class domestic?
November 23, 2017
Did Not Finish...40% completed. Well simply put, I can't take much of the author's pretentious ramblings at present and I have decided not to waste another minute to it..I have better books to read!
December 19, 2022
lush, dense, immaculate, uncompromising. i want to examine suleri's passages the way you would pick apart an architect's scale model.
February 8, 2018
Did not finish. This was such a struggle as the language is bizarre to say the least. I read so many passages over and over again to try to make sense of them but to no avail. It’s as if it’s been written with a thesaurus, or as if the writer has invented new meanings for words with no thought to how her reader is supposed to understand what she’s trying to say. Littered with incoherent metaphors in such a way that reeks of pretentious. I’ve not been this stumped by a book in a long time. It’s a shame because it promised so much from the blurb and the first chapter/essay, and this is a topic I long to read about.
October 19, 2015
If you're looking for some insight into Pakistan, this is not the book for you. It's mostly stream of consciousness with sentences that seem intentionally convoluted, as if difficult to understand = profound.
September 23, 2022
Read this book years back but want to return to it again. Sharp writing and piercing observations of all the members of Suleri's family. An impressionistic rather than chronological narrative laced with lime-sharp wit.
June 30, 2023
Exceptionally idiosyncratic lexicon akin to what our English teachers coerced us to adopt while growing up in South Asia. For that reason, the memoir clutched my nostalgia for a time and place I personally never even experienced.
The lack of a linear chronological narrative was made up by its metaphorical prose. That said, some metaphors and allegories were tortuous to an extent where one could have easily lost the plot. The stylistic choices baffled me; perhaps Suleri’s complex sentences were just mirroring her own dilemmas of identity and relationships, but they certainly added more density to her narration. I suppose the writing gets better in the last couple of chapters where the characters almost come to life, mainly because of her piercing observations and choice to remain less pretentious while nearing the end.
There were a fair bit of enjoyable cheeky literature references that I liked (e.g. Pip’s Miltonic eyes). Some observations painfully struck a chord as a fellow South Asian woman, but it certainly is palpable for a global audience. Only disclaimer is to approach with caution without getting lost in its stylistic structure (read: pretentious ramblings).
The lack of a linear chronological narrative was made up by its metaphorical prose. That said, some metaphors and allegories were tortuous to an extent where one could have easily lost the plot. The stylistic choices baffled me; perhaps Suleri’s complex sentences were just mirroring her own dilemmas of identity and relationships, but they certainly added more density to her narration. I suppose the writing gets better in the last couple of chapters where the characters almost come to life, mainly because of her piercing observations and choice to remain less pretentious while nearing the end.
There were a fair bit of enjoyable cheeky literature references that I liked (e.g. Pip’s Miltonic eyes). Some observations painfully struck a chord as a fellow South Asian woman, but it certainly is palpable for a global audience. Only disclaimer is to approach with caution without getting lost in its stylistic structure (read: pretentious ramblings).
January 6, 2023
to begin with, the writing was terrible. it took me a while to understand what she was talking about
as a diaspora myself, this did not connect with me and in no way did I feel nostalgic.
most memoirs are disturbing i get it, but just because someone has published their life stories doesnt mean i need to read them, right?
besides, this felt more like a practice writing exercise than a proper book
there is not a single character, let alone the main narrator, that i felt relatable to or that had intrigued me
maybe the dadi was someone who I understood better
as a diaspora myself, this did not connect with me and in no way did I feel nostalgic.
most memoirs are disturbing i get it, but just because someone has published their life stories doesnt mean i need to read them, right?
besides, this felt more like a practice writing exercise than a proper book
there is not a single character, let alone the main narrator, that i felt relatable to or that had intrigued me
maybe the dadi was someone who I understood better
January 14, 2025
LOVED this book. Was reading it fully aware I’d reread at some point, not just because it is beautifully written but also because I think I missed a lot. I liked how it kinda orbited around themes, leaving a lot unsaid. And also saying things in a pretty confusing way. Themes: partition, grief, womanhood 💅
November 24, 2025
This book feels almost otherworldly: delicious prose, wicked insight, sentences that saunter with casual verve across the page. The first essay begins with one of the most tantalizing first lines I’ve yet to encounter: “Leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of women.” Addictive!
February 14, 2021
DNF-ed! Couldn’t bear to read another word about humans’ and goats’ private parts. Yes, this is what half of the book is about. And the other half is sarcasm relating to Pakistan and Islam. Sorry, not my cup of tea!
April 18, 2021
1.5 - I had high expectations for this book and it didn't deliver. I'm not one to DNF a book but this one sure did tempt me.
The first chapter is actually what made me want to read this book. Here are two quotes that really spiked my interest:
'My audience is lost, and angry to be lost, and both of us must find some token of exchange for this failed conversation.'
'I'll answer slowly, there are no women in the third world.'
Suleri tries to comment on the negative ways Pakistani culture adapts Islam but she does not do it well. She presents her problems and issues within Pakistani culture but does not explain them to her readers. Her overzealous use of language had me repelling in many instances and questioning what it was that I was actually reading. An example, 'the dusky iftar that ended the fast after the mosques had lustily rung with the call for the maghrib prayer.
I nearly DNF'd it around 17% which is rare for me but decided to trudge through. There was so much potential, so many ideas that were/ are interesting that could have been addressed and explored but Suleri managed to overlook them. She referred to many interesting and important cultural issues and biases that need to be addressed but didn't explain or expand on any of them. The second half of the book was more bearable but still had its moments.
Here are some quotes - issues I found interesting that were not explored to their full potential, mainly from the second half.
'To walk away from such a history is all very well,' I pointed out to Shahid, 'but it is less easy to walk away from that other thing, from womankind.'
' men live in homes, and women live in bodies'
' for the first time in my life I wished I were a woman who could wear a veil, an advertisement of anonymity to mirror all the blackness in my mind.'
' I am observing what it means to be an observation.'
' You are my wheaten daughter,' he declared, 'wheaten, and most beautiful!'
' Did she really think that she could assume the burden of empire, that if she let my father colonize her body and her name she would perform some slight reparation for the race from which she came?'
and lastly,
' Speaking two languages may seem a relative affluence, but more often it entails the problems of maintaining a second establishment even though your body can be in only one place at a time.
The first chapter is actually what made me want to read this book. Here are two quotes that really spiked my interest:
'My audience is lost, and angry to be lost, and both of us must find some token of exchange for this failed conversation.'
'I'll answer slowly, there are no women in the third world.'
Suleri tries to comment on the negative ways Pakistani culture adapts Islam but she does not do it well. She presents her problems and issues within Pakistani culture but does not explain them to her readers. Her overzealous use of language had me repelling in many instances and questioning what it was that I was actually reading. An example, 'the dusky iftar that ended the fast after the mosques had lustily rung with the call for the maghrib prayer.
I nearly DNF'd it around 17% which is rare for me but decided to trudge through. There was so much potential, so many ideas that were/ are interesting that could have been addressed and explored but Suleri managed to overlook them. She referred to many interesting and important cultural issues and biases that need to be addressed but didn't explain or expand on any of them. The second half of the book was more bearable but still had its moments.
Here are some quotes - issues I found interesting that were not explored to their full potential, mainly from the second half.
'To walk away from such a history is all very well,' I pointed out to Shahid, 'but it is less easy to walk away from that other thing, from womankind.'
' men live in homes, and women live in bodies'
' for the first time in my life I wished I were a woman who could wear a veil, an advertisement of anonymity to mirror all the blackness in my mind.'
' I am observing what it means to be an observation.'
' You are my wheaten daughter,' he declared, 'wheaten, and most beautiful!'
' Did she really think that she could assume the burden of empire, that if she let my father colonize her body and her name she would perform some slight reparation for the race from which she came?'
and lastly,
' Speaking two languages may seem a relative affluence, but more often it entails the problems of maintaining a second establishment even though your body can be in only one place at a time.
February 3, 2020
For the right reader, this memoir -- really, a collection of loosely-linked essays -- could be a delight, but I'm not that reader. Suleri's chapters are meandering ruminations on her relatives, their diaspora from Pakistan, their domestic successes and tragedies. I'd seen the book recommended as a perceptive and touching account, from the perspective of a woman, of growing up in Pakistan in the 1960s and 1970s. Some images and turns of phrase are surprising and lovely. Unfortunately, Suleri's baroque writing style is uneven. Here's an example, selected nearly at random:
"In our early years, those most intensely talkable, Dale and I so savored the taste of articulating ourselves in each other's presence that we rarely conversed outside the splendid way a life unfolds itself to its most prized audience. Now, however, we are more discreet: our landscapes are worn, full of old and nubbly mountains, less interested in the great continental shift that hefted us into being in the first place than in the ordinary accident of things, the lope of a passing camel or the strut of a goat. Today, we rarely -- gingerly -- talk about ourselves." (p.46)
The layering of complicated conceits is typical. Some are opaque. What is 'the splendid way life unfolds itself'? Does she merely mean they talked about themselves, which she's already said? The most interesting detail, that now they only speak of themselves 'gingerly', is reduced to a cryptic single word in the last sentence. The transition from the metaphorical to the concrete -- from landscapes to livestock -- isn't obvious, increasing the potential for confusion until you realize that she means an actual camel walking by. And do they really talk about how animals walk? Throughout the book, Suleri opts for multisyllabic Latinate words where short, punchy words would serve better. In some chapters (though not this one), she drops in the phrase 'of course' when she is about to confide a fact that no one outside of her immediate family could possibly know. This usage excludes the reader; it's like trying to have a conversation with someone who keeps speaking to themselves instead of you, and wants to make sure you know they're doing it intentionally.
At some point I may circle back to read more of this memoir, for the pleasure of the occasional striking passages, but probably not for a while.
"In our early years, those most intensely talkable, Dale and I so savored the taste of articulating ourselves in each other's presence that we rarely conversed outside the splendid way a life unfolds itself to its most prized audience. Now, however, we are more discreet: our landscapes are worn, full of old and nubbly mountains, less interested in the great continental shift that hefted us into being in the first place than in the ordinary accident of things, the lope of a passing camel or the strut of a goat. Today, we rarely -- gingerly -- talk about ourselves." (p.46)
The layering of complicated conceits is typical. Some are opaque. What is 'the splendid way life unfolds itself'? Does she merely mean they talked about themselves, which she's already said? The most interesting detail, that now they only speak of themselves 'gingerly', is reduced to a cryptic single word in the last sentence. The transition from the metaphorical to the concrete -- from landscapes to livestock -- isn't obvious, increasing the potential for confusion until you realize that she means an actual camel walking by. And do they really talk about how animals walk? Throughout the book, Suleri opts for multisyllabic Latinate words where short, punchy words would serve better. In some chapters (though not this one), she drops in the phrase 'of course' when she is about to confide a fact that no one outside of her immediate family could possibly know. This usage excludes the reader; it's like trying to have a conversation with someone who keeps speaking to themselves instead of you, and wants to make sure you know they're doing it intentionally.
At some point I may circle back to read more of this memoir, for the pleasure of the occasional striking passages, but probably not for a while.
December 16, 2008
The book is a melancholic memoir about Suleri's family from when she lived with them in Pakistan to present. Each chapter profiles a different person in the family, with one or two extra chapters about important friends in her life.
My main issue with the book is that many of Suleri's metaphors are nearly impossible to understand. Perhaps I have such different points of reference, but there were some sentences I read over and over to no avail. My best guess is that many things have meanings for Suleri that are not universal.
Someone who was a double major in philosophy and literature might fare better than I did.
That being said, the chapter on Ifat... wow. Ifat is Suleri's older sister, and Suleri captures the emotions between two close sisters amazingly well. I don't know if I have ever read something so close to my own experience, and I would recommend the chapter to anyone in a close sister-sister relationship.
My main issue with the book is that many of Suleri's metaphors are nearly impossible to understand. Perhaps I have such different points of reference, but there were some sentences I read over and over to no avail. My best guess is that many things have meanings for Suleri that are not universal.
Someone who was a double major in philosophy and literature might fare better than I did.
That being said, the chapter on Ifat... wow. Ifat is Suleri's older sister, and Suleri captures the emotions between two close sisters amazingly well. I don't know if I have ever read something so close to my own experience, and I would recommend the chapter to anyone in a close sister-sister relationship.
February 20, 2008
Throughout Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days food functions as the connective tissue that binds together, in one very animated and determinedly introspective corpus, multiple layers of politics, culture, identity, gender, emotions and spirituality. Suleri’s idiomatic commingling of foodstuffs and physical bodies lays out a rich, multi-textured, somatic discourse that not only examines the embodied experience of its narrator, but also that of women, particularly those whose bodies are thought to exist in the “third world”. This fusion of flesh and food works to serve up a proof that personal history, cultural circumstances and subjective reality are inextricably intertwined and that to deny this would be tantamount to refusing the nourishment required to sustain life itself.
July 16, 2018
I *really* wanted to enjoy this book, to an extent that you can enjoy a "searing" memoir. But ohmygod is it hard to read! I was so relieved to find other one-star reviewers who complained about the exact same problem. The sentences are long and convoluted, the story jumps around all the time and it feels like the author really wanted to show just how many complicated words she knows in English. There's elegance in precise wording but this book was not it - it felt unnecessarily pretentious. Too bad because the subject of the book sounds really compelling. Couldn't get past the first two chapters.
April 29, 2009
I didn't really read this book. I like the title, I love the cover photo. But it read like a book written by an academic for academics. After a few chapters I felt no motivation to understand what she was trying to say or why. I couldn't sympathize with her character or her judgements of the potentially more inviting characters she introduces and then neglects.
May 31, 2018
I persevered for as long as I could but I couldn’t bear the writing style. It may be poetic to some people but to me it was rambling and jumpy. I felt like I needed to decode each paragraph and required a study guide to support my comprehension! It was not enjoyable for me...it made my brain ache!!
Ended up DNFing this one after 40%
Ended up DNFing this one after 40%
August 9, 2011
Everyone, but everyone, discouraged me from reading this book, The general agreement was (most from those who hadn't read it) that it was too "verbose". Ignoring the reviewers I went ahead and read it. Result: Suleri is my favourite Pakistani writer. I'd recommend this book to anybody, any day.
December 21, 2008
Excellent.
November 16, 2012
It was WONDERFUL.
April 27, 2013
Splendidly written
August 31, 2022
“To fall asleep on Ifat’s bed was milk enough, to sleep in crumbling rest beside her body.” Beautiful prose. The way Suleri writes about her family members tugs at your heart- because it is so honest- not romanticized, but from a place of grief, care, and love.
May 14, 2023
Ummm...yeah...!! Not for me...!
July 20, 2023
only if it was a little less pretentious
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