Atlas of the Heart

This Booker Prize-shortlisted novel slyly scans the collision of India and the world through a postponed romance

- Debanjan Dhar

EARLY in Kiran Desai's new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a character remarks, “Western psychology is no match for an Indian family. We are too slippery, we change shape, we don’t distinguish truth from lies—you can’t pin us down.” It’s this very malleability Desai maps in her luxuriously winding saga of displacement and remaking on a global stage. Spanning the late 1990s and early 2000s, the novel harks back to Desai’s 2006 Booker winner, The Inheritance of Loss. A sense of a generation passing, fraying houses, a keen eye for tension within India’s social classes, knotty dynamics between India and the West riddled with self-loathing and shame—both books share a spiritual fabric.

But The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is more richly alert to an idea of India as existing within and performing for a Western gaze. At the same time, Desai deconstructs this particular framing with her ensemble slipping in and out of geographically inflected models. Balancing wit and humour with precise, incisive observation, the novel continually lays bare both how the emigrant and the one staying behind are shaped by displacement all around. Therefore, identities, aspirations and insecurities remain in flux, tempering themselves as per specific arrivals and departures. As the gaze sweeps across in The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, agency and power swing vis-à-vis location and hierarchy.