Books: Such a Lonely Journey
Two decades after winning the Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai has delivered another highly praised, Booker-worthy novel. Indeed, Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is one of the six shortlisted novels for the Booker Prize this year. The winner will be announced in November.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hogarth), a nearly 700-page tome, isn’t for the weak-hearted. But with her highly anticipated new novel, close to two decades in the making, Kiran Desai has made a spectacular comeback. Daughter of the celebrated author Anita Desai, she grew up in big cities—Delhi and Bombay—and also experienced the simple world of hillside towns like Kalimpong (near Darjeeling), immersed in books and living in a writer’s world. Where she grew up and where she now lives, New York City, heavily influences how she sees the world, almost as an outsider, but entrenched in a writer’s observational life.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny isn’t just about the main characters—two immigrant students to America, one in Vermont and the other in New York City, two writers uncomfortably fitting in both worlds, finding themselves, each other, and their tenuous connection to home. Every character in this work is fully developed, surprisingly curious, and animated, making a reader want to know everything about them.
In most interviews for the novel, Desai shows where home for her has been for the past 25 years—Jackson Heights in Queens, where diversity is the fabric of the community, in people, ideas, food, culture, and language. This is where Sunny, the main character lands post-Italy. As a writer, Desai actively pulls us into her characters’ worlds, the confusion of where to belong, the imposter syndrome—and, yes, the call for love and home. Sonia, drawn from the author’s own experience as an Indian student in America, lays bare the homesickness and, frankly, the loneliness in a country that’s not your own.
Much like Desai did in Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, her debut, Sonia works on a story of a man on a tree with his beloved langur monkeys—stories that perhaps exoticize India and force Sonia to ask questions: What makes a writer, and who (the audience) do they write for? Sonia escapes an ill-fated and horrifyingly abusive relationship with a decades older artist, Ilan de Toorjen Foss, as well as a soul-destroying stint at an art gallery, before returning to India to write about what she’s familiar with. Sonia and Sunny are forced to connect through a marriage proposal that goes nowhere as Sunny is with his American girlfriend, who he has hidden from his family. It’s a familiar story of the late 1990s, the era this novel is set in, but readers may find that difficult to relate to if they haven’t lived through that period. Fate then reconnects them, now both writers, as they fumble to find a footing in a peculiarly unfamiliar India.
Credit: M. Sharkey
Desai is deft in her expansive descriptions of place and inner monologues of all the well-developed characters, including even the minor ones. Whether it is Babita, Sunny’s mother musing, “If you were a worthy Indian, you became an American,” or Papa, Sonia’s father, on the slow unraveling of his own marriage (“. . . they had behaved for the first time in a long while with civility, but this just made a worse sorrow.”), the lives are three-dimensional and charged with decisions, conflicts, and unrest. Desai writes about a house in the clouds, where Sonia’s mother lives in a place that Desai herself is familiar with, and also about Delhi in a way only those who have lived there can (“. . . the slightly old taste of Delhi water and the slightly flat, slightly stale odor of the Delhi night that smelled as if it has been shut away in a cupboard”).
At a literary gala, Desai told me that my food posts on social media made her hungry—and so, in this novel, it’s not surprising that food has a special place. She has lived in Queens as an almost recluse for years, enjoying the kababs and arepas in neighborhood eateries, which make an appearance in her work. An article in The Guardian finds her amused with her uncle describing her as derelict, a title she accepts good-humoredly. In interviews since, she has held her role as a writer living the life in service of art with deep conviction, and it shows. Desai dedicated almost two decades to gather material for her 5,000-page manuscript, which she slowly whittled to 700 pages to create this Booker Prize-shortlisted novel.
Literary media and newsmakers are hailing The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny as a love story with a happy ending. But as are all of Desai’s work, it’s much bigger than that. Desai herself notes this love story to be influenced by Asian and non-American storytellers like Tolstoy, Kundera, and Kawabata who describe love she identifies with. She says the novel was her attempt to talk about politics for the sake of art. While it dives into the fatalistic quality of the main characters, it’s a love letter to 1990s Delhi, to everchanging present-day New York, to a simple life in the mountains that isn’t, and a commentary on social hierarchies that are obvious in India and subtle in America, on arranged marriages, on arranged love, on abusive partnerships, on art, on the writer’s life, and on the complicated lives of characters who are well-developed, unapologetic, and desperately human.
Madhushree Ghosh, who works in oncology diagnostics, is the author of Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory, and Family, which won an Independent Publisher Book Award (Gold). Her second book, Safar: Finding Home, History, and Culture through Punjabi Food in the American West, will be published by Bloomsbury next year.
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