Boys Will Be Boys

Description

In Boys Will Be Boys, Sara Suleri returns to her childhood and early adulthood to pay tribute to her father, the political journalist Z A Suleri (known as Pip, for his “patriotic and preposterous” disposition). Taking its title from that jokingly chosen by her father for his unwritten autobiography, Boys Will Be Boys dips in and out of Suleri’s upbringing in Pakistan and her life in the United States, moving between public and private history and addressing questions of loss and cultural displacement through a resolutely comic lens. In this rich portrait, Pip emerges as a prodigious figure: an ardent agitator against British rule in the 1930s and 1940s, a founder of the Times of Karachi and the Evening Times, on-and-off editor of The Pakistan Times, for a brief time director of the Pakistan military intelligence service, and a frequently jailed antagonist of successive Pakistani leaders. To the author, though, he was also “preposterous… counting himself king of infinite space,” a man who imposed outrageously on his children.

As Suleri chronicles, Pip demanded their loyalty yet banished them easily from his favor: contrary and absurdly unfair, he read their diaries, interfered in their relationships, and believed in father’s inalienable right to oppress his children. Suleri invites the reader into an intimacy shaped equally by history and intensely personal detail, creating an elegant elegy for a man of force and contradiction. And perhaps Pip was not so preposterous after all: “On Judgment Day,” he told his daughter. “I will say to God, Be merciful, for I have already been judged by my child.”

Review

“[Boys Will Be Boys] is best read, as Suleri signaled in her earlier book Meatless Days, as a procession of little tales : honed into near-perfection by the story-teller’s art, haunted by the elegance of Urdu and English poets. Meatless Days has a singular position in the South Asian canon. Boys Will Be Boys, echoing it after a wait of fifteen years, is, if anything, better still.” – Aamer Hussein (The Independent)

Author Biography

Sara Suleri (1953 – ) is an academic, critic and author. She grew up in Lahore and earned degrees from Kinnaird College and University of the Punjab, and later a doctorate from Indiana University. She is a Professor Emeritus at Yale University and lives in the USA.