Kiran Desai

Real Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The spellbinding story of two young people whose fates will intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss

Behind every love story are the myriad stories of two families.

In the snowy mountains of Vermont, Sonia is lonely. A college student and aspiring writer homesick for India, she turns to an older artist for show more inspiration and intimacy, a man who will cast a dark spell on the next many years of her life. In Brooklyn, Sunny is lonely, too. A struggling journalist originally from Delhi, he is both beguiled and perplexed by his American girlfriend and the country in which he plans to find his future. As Sonia and Sunny each becomes more and more alienated, they begin to question their understanding of happiness, human connection, and where they belong.

Back in India, Sonia and Sunny's extended families cannot fathom how anyone could be lonely in this great, bustling world. They arrange a meeting between the two—a clumsy meddling that only drives Sonia and Sunny apart before they have a chance to fall in love.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: If this *immense*, intense, and deeply emotionally charged novel is not on the Booker shortlist tomorrow, I will kick off big time.

Sonia and Sunny and their families are excellent company. Like anyone you spend this much time with, there are moments of irritated shouting, times of sad, misty dripping, and the occasional whoop of glee. (Note to self: reading stories like this at 3am can lead to justifiably angry quarters-sharers. Best not to.)

What I got out of this Dickensian-in-scope tale of love, Love, imperialism, racism, chicanery, skulduggery, and the immutable urge to discover Truths greater than self-actualization, was the conviction that there needs to be a new category of read: a Bildungsroman for adults figuring their {stuff} out; a one-volume roman-fleuve for the increasing number of Indian-authored epic novels that feel even bigger in scope than they are.

Love, love, and desire figure into both of the above subgenres. I think of the old joke describing Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses as "horny Irish medical student goes on a rampage" and I'm still pretty sure that is the whole reason Joyce didn't stop at A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man...he had so much more to say.

This could have been A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man-length but Author Desai had a Ulysses-esque lump in her throat. It's a lot, Sunny alone is a novel's worth of weird (mother Babita and her...unexpected...opinions and cheese-related kleptomania), but Sonia and her nasty time with Ilan (older, jealous artist-lover) could've been another entire book fully satisfying the criteria of novelhood. (NB: this is the beginning of the book; persevere, ye who dislike this truthtelling trope. It's not like that all the way through.)

The weight of expectation, of cultural baggage, on aspiring artist Sonia (I'd read her novel!) and journalist Sunny (a byline I'd look for!) as they try to figure out their paths in the buzzing hive of US culture and politics, all stewed up with many people they run into (sometimes literally) along the way: crushing, annihilating, and in the end energizing. Loneliness and fear and baggage motivate these two, where they squash so many. Across the world there are people with the talent and the drive, but not the luck, of Sonia and Sunny, and we will never hear their names.

We have, now, heard their names, in Author Desai's busy, overstuffed novel. I hope in that magical-realist liminal place they are, they know and are happier for it. Seher, Sonia's mother said it best: "Loneliness could mean abiding peace. It could mean understanding your happiness backward, when you happened to exclaim out loud, surprising yourself when there was no apparent reason, I'm happy!"

Shout it, folks, you've been found. show less

A delightful family drama that covers decades and continents. Both of the main characters are writers, or at least aspire to be. Those aspirations give Desai an opportunity to offer meta commentary of her own art. She walks us though the immigrant experience, through the use of native art forms from Bollywood to magic realism, and through faith and miracle. Each motif has its own moment to drive the plot, and over the decades the smallness of Sunny and Sonia's world circles back on itself.

As I finish this year and this magnificent novel, I consider the gentle theme of coming to accept what initially seems impossible. The plot centers around Sonia, a college student from Delhi stuck in Vermont during winter break, who meets a much older painter, Ilan, who takes over every aspect of her life as his inspiration and her ruination. After moving to New York for an internship at an art gallery, Sonia is abruptly removed from Ilan's ambit by his wife, and flees back to Allahabad, show more Uttar Pradesh. There she encounters Sunny, a reporter living in New York and working for the AP, whose mother Babita, despite the continents between them, has Sunny tied unmercifully to her side. When Sonia and Sunny finally meet, after a proposed arranged marriage is rejected by both, there's strong chemistry, but Sonia is still emotionally tied to Ilan and Sunny to Babita. As the two make their way, separately and apart, through Goa, Italy, and Mexico, the inevitability of their joining wavers. Many fascinating characters are essential to the rambling story: Sonia's estranged parents; Babita's brothers-in-law, the epitome of corruption that informs so much of daily life in India; Sunny's best friend Satya, who invites Sunny along on his honeymoon to Goa, which proves to be pivotal to the lives of all the characters; and Mina Foy, Sonia's aunt, whose suitor was rejected due to caste differences. The physical territory of each country the author takes us is generously described, perhaps overmuch, but where else can such a splendid competition between India and Mexico described in terms of women and chilis be found? Their discovery of Ilan's paintings of Sonia in a museum in Venice leads to their sudden parting, but Sunny's dangerous quest to retrieve an amulet Sonia gave to Ilan brings on the denouement. The book will not appeal to those who don't enjoy long and meandering reads, but the audio book (21 CDs!) and its splendid narrator, Sneha Mathan, will keep many readers, especially those who love stories set in India, entranced through all 25 hours. One could happily drive cross country, subsumed within this story.

Quote: "The denuded mountains were falling out of themselves." show less

A story of immigrants, the Old World and the New World. Each Indian character we meet is powerless in the face of empires: the apex power of 1980s America and the declined but still culturally formidable power of the British Empire.

Each has a reason to hold themselves part from their countrymen and their peers. But where the novel threatens to slip into satire and absurdity, Desai steers it back to pathos. When Biju, the lowly cook's son made "good" in America (where he really works a show more sequence of low paying and unrewarding jobs as an undocumented immigrant), finds himself returned to his homeland, he stands two unnamed fellow travellers, who share a moment with a similar traveler that summarizes the entire novel:
"'Each time you come back you think something must have changed, but it's always the same.'
'That's right,' said the other man. 'You don't like to say it but you have to. Some countries don't get ahead for a reason.'"

The characters of this little tragedy seem to blame each other, but we can see that they never stood a chance against the wealth, weapons, and allure of the West. show less