Kiran Desai: “There's is a story behind the story”

The Booker winner on her new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a sprawling intergenerational saga that's on the prize longlist this year

- Saurabh Sharma

Sonia thinks of how a story about kebabs can end up being something larger: “This was India. You might try to write a slender story, but it inevitably connected to a larger one.” Was the novel imagined differently when you set out to write it?

When I started writing this book, I had no idea it would sprawl into something so large, but I was following the stories as they unfolded, with all the connections between a huge cast of family members.

It always strikes me when I'm reading a novel from Europe or the US, in which writers focus on just one or two people: there is no family. For example, I was reading Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment about a couple who fall apart traumatically. It had no mother, father, aunts, or uncles... no Indian writer could honestly write such a book. Even in the absence of a family, the absence is so present.

The sentiment Sonia shares is based on an article I wrote about kebabs, finding that it was quite an insane task, because I had no idea what a catalogue they could amount to —far too big for a simple article.

From the book: “What happened within a family, what happened between a couple, was no different from that which happened in a nation under dictatorship, running on fear.” With Sunny as a reporter and Sonia as an aspiring novelist, it appears the novel is saying something about truth-telling.