Some good things are definitely worth waiting for. Fans of Kiran Desai’s Booker Award-winning novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006), have waited nearly two decades for her next novel. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a deeply satisfying, profoundly moving, witty, and occasionally heart-rending novel that explores immigration; alienation; the relationship between art, the artist, and artistic subject; and the changing role of women in contemporary India.
Kiran Desai—whose mother is Anita Desai, an award-winning writer from India and a Booker nominee herself—pens a work that is both distinct from her mother’s but also has many echoes of her mother’s work.
Sonia and Sunny are the grandchildren of two elderly gentlemen who live in Allahabad. Sonia is a student in a small college in a remote Vermont town and struggles with loneliness, so her grandfather sends a marriage proposal for his friend’s grandson Sunny, who is a journalist in New York city. The proposal goes nowhere, but the lives of these two young people intertwine over many years.
Both are hiding their romantic lives from their families: Sonia is in a relationship with an artist, Ilan, who is several decades older than her, and Sunny is living with Ulla, a woman from Kansas, about whom he says nothing to his mother, Babita. Babita is a widow living in a bifurcated property in Delhi in a perpetual feud with her brothers-in-law over their father’s will and has an intense relationship with her son which is both loving and toxic.
Sonia’s parents fall out of love, and her mother, who is half-German and half-Bengali, departs to her cottage in the hills, leaving Sonia’s father fretting about his life. Sonia’s mother spends her time translating her German father’s journals—he had been an artist who mysteriously disappeared in the mountains.
Sonia’s aunt, Mina Foi, is divorced and lives with her brother and parents until the latter die. She then moves into a convent to take care of boarders at their school and to be cared for by the nuns—mostly because she could not marry the love of her life, who was Catholic.
Sonia’s relationship with Ilan is violent, controlling, and abusive, but offers her an art education that both inspires and thwarts her life as a fiction writer. When her relationship blows up after Ilan’s wife comes back, Sonia returns to India to try and figure out her life. She freelances for a magazine and works on her fiction writing.
There, she meets Sunny and they fall in love. Their relationship takes a tortuous path through many years, several vacations, hauntings by a hound dog (or Sonia’s mental breakdown), American visa regimes, 9/11, and a lost amulet with magical properties, which was created by Sonia’s grandfather and passed on to her—only to be stolen by Ilan, for whom it is an inspiration. The novel takes us through Allahabad, Delhi, Goa, New York, Venice, and Mexico before the two lovers reunite.
A long novel, almost 700 pages, spanning several years and countries with a huge cast of characters could be baggy and unwieldy, but Desai masterfully intertwines these different elements to keep the reader enthralled and taking them through an emotional and thoughtful journey. Like Anita Desai’s fiction, the characters and their inner lives dominate; there are many solitary, eccentric women in this novel, and the scenes in the mountains of India, in Mexico, and in Delhi echo several of Anita Desai’s novels. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is longlisted for the Booker Prize and has earned its spot there. This is a novel that is worth reading more than once.
Kiran Desai will be in conversation with Kimberly A.C. Wilson at the JLF Lit Fest Seattle on September 20th in Town Hall. Tickets and information available at https://jlflitfest.org/seattle.
Nalini Iyer is a Professor of English at Seattle University where she teaches courses in Asian American, Postcolonial, and South Asian Studies. She is the author/editor of several books in literary criticism. She lives in Kirkland. WA.
