In the apparent dedication of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, the author writes:
“Dear Pat,
You came across me carving a little figure out of wood and said, “Why don’t you make something for me?”
I asked you what you wanted and you said, “A box.”
“For what reason?”
“To put things in.”
“What kind of things?”
“Whatever you have,” you said.
Well, here’s your box. It has almost everything I have in it and it’s not full. There is pain and excitement in it, and a good feeling or a bad feeling and bad thoughts and good thoughts – the joy of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creating.
And beyond that, all the gratitude and love I feel for you.
And the box still isn’t full.’
Source: The Booker Prize
The words are tender and bold – an artist admitting that his work contains almost everything he has. The same goes for Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a BookerShortlisted novel that feels like her own artfully carved box – full of love, loneliness and every emotion in between, coupled with the joy of creating.
Romance, but at the same time the ability to be yourself
As you can imagine, Kiran Desai’s book is (at least in the beginning) a kind of love story between Sonia and Sunny, two Indians in America, as they go back and forth from each other’s lives. The book is as captivating as a film. While the length may be daunting – it clocks in at over 700 pages – it is the kind of literature that completely engulfs you.
The reader can make a wild (and possibly inaccurate) guess that Sonia appears to be a version of Desai. When we meet her at the beginning of the book, she is the smallest version of herself, swallowed up by sadness, in a relationship with an artist and herself, a muse. The book follows almost every trope possible, but Desai almost breaks the third wall by acknowledging it and doing it with an enviable amount of intellect.
Race, pervasive class and intellect in Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.
Sunny, her counterpart, is an Allahabadi man who embodies the discomfort of diaspora – the feeling of belonging everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Through him, Desai captures the complex indignities of class and race that shape brownness in white-dominated spaces, sentiments that are often felt before they are fully understood.
Through him, Desai captures the complex indignities of class and race that shape brownness in white-dominated spaces, sentiments that are often felt before they are fully understood.
Characters circling around her are as alive as a film cast. Babita, Sunny’s eccentric and volatile mother, is one of the most memorable – flawed, annoying and yet with a compassion that makes her love bleed. Desai allows even her most unlikeable characters moments of grace. Satya, Sunny’s childhood best friend, moves to rural America to study medicine – but she doesn’t settle in quite well there.
Source: The Booker Prize
When the two return to India in search of brides, Satya’s bitterness curdles; He is looking for a woman who will protect his fragile self-confidence masculinity. However, towards the end both he and his wife Pooja are redeemed, and perhaps it reflects the idea of human existence that there is a Jekyll and a Hyde in each of us.
The double-edged sword of motherhood
Babita, Sunny’s mother – is the most memorable. A widow from Allahabad, she embodies vanity and vulnerability, a woman whose eccentricities obscure the loneliness of a generation left behind. She interferes in her son’s life, tries to gain control, and yet her motives are imbued with love. Desai writes without irony and allows her complexity to unfold with tenderness. In an unforgettable scene, Babita’s attempts to reconcile Sunny’s American life with her own sense of moral order end in absurd comedy and quiet heartbreak. She is in many ways the moral center of the novel, insisting through her contradictions that love is never neat and family is never easy.
If Sonia and Sunny Desais are explorers of the outside world, Babita is their reminder of what cannot be escaped. The pull of home, the persistence of Memorythe absurdity of our moral standards. Desai shows her such compassion that even her most annoying moments bleed with love.
If Sonia and Sunny Desais are explorers of the outside world, Babita is their reminder of what cannot be escaped.
Desai’s novel is teeming with such characters – friends, artists and intellectuals, each coming into their own, no easy task, and each experiencing a moment of redemption. It is a love story, a social observation and a historical reckoning.
Source: Britannica
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is ambitious, intimate and full of heart. Like Steinbeck’s box, it contains almost everything. Love and loss, intellect and instinct, desperation and intent, and yet somehow it is not complete.
Treya covers art, culture, climate and the environment. Even when she was little, she aspired to become a journalist. She has reported for The Hindu and Deccan Chronicle, among others, examining how feminism takes root in everyday life by leading sessions with young people on gender, digital security and the “good girl” syndrome.
