1. Sara Suleri Goodyear's heartbreaking 1989 memoir of life in Pakistan, Meatless Days, circles backward and forward in time and space, from Lahore to Connecticut and around again.
2. Meatless Days book. Read 64 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. In this finely wrought memoir of life in postcolonial Pakistan, Suler.

Meatless Days

Meatless Days is an act of postcolonial mourning offered with redeeming humour and a critical eye to the very possibility of autobiographical writing. Suleri's need to reflect upon and reconstruct the lives of her family answers her father's withdrawal from the subject. Meatless Days by Sara Suleri, a personal memoir, is split into nine essays rather than chapters as each part revolves around one specific character with whom Suleri shared a certain bond during a certain period of her life.

by Sara Suleri

University of Chicago Press, 186 pages, $17.95

Sara Suleri`s first book presents the same critical problem as do anchovies or capers.

It is not easy to explain why you pronounce things delicious even as you wince while devouring them. Also, there is no predicting their effect on another palate.

Suleri must certainly write the densest prose since James Joyce, maybe because her maternal inheritance is Welsh. On Suleri`s accounting, her mother was the only taciturn inhabitant of the high-decible household of the author`s youth. Perhaps the Celtic gene for verbal elaboration is recessive and appears in alternate generations.

Whatever the case, 'Meatless Days,' Suleri`s memoir of growing up in the East and migrating to the West is almost too rich to be absorbed except in small bites. Consider the following passage, which is typical of her delight in constructing figures of speech so convoluted that while trying to digest them we completely forget the issue they were supposed to make clearer:

'Balance, I`d say, is the word we want, its euphemism tautly strung like all the crazily overloaded telephone wires that scribble ill-connection from center to urban center.'

What, indeed, would Suleri, who now teaches English at Yale, make of such writing if it came to her in a student`s blue book? She would probably invoke some age-old advice to budding authors, such as, Simplify your style, don`t sacrifice narrative to a clever turn of phrase.

About the only thing that can be forecast for this book is that it is likely to turn off whole groups of readers. Suleri was born in Pakistan, yet she is not a Third World writer-at least, not in the way that aficionados of exotic cultures understand the term.

Her father, a Pakistani journalist, was imprisoned by the British under the Raj. Afterward, his newspaper was silenced by Pakistani politicians who appreciated his criticism even less than their predecessors.

From her father`s experience Suleri learned that having suffered colonialism doesn`t guarentee unqualified sainthood to either individuals or nations, and that people who have been oppressed often become much like their former oppressors.

Her title comes from a quixotic development plan of Pakistan`s founding fathers. Two days each week were designated as meatless, ostensibly to conserve the food supply, a theory that didn`t alter the fact that most Pakistanis can`t afford meat anyway.

Feminist readers may similarly be put off by Suleri`s denial of sisterhood.

'A face, puzzled and attentive and belonging to my gender, raises its intelligence to question why, since I am teaching third-world writing, I haven`t given equal space to women writers,' Suleri reports of her adventures in an American classroom. 'Because, I`ll answer slowly, there are no women in the third world.'

Meatless Days By Sara Suleri Pdf

By that Suleri seems to mean that the life and dilemmas of her homeland are too complex to be subsumed under the neat categories of enlightened Westerners.

Meatless Days By Sara Suleri Sparknotes

Accordingly, 'Meatless Days' is a dual travelogue. It 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.