A 'Romeo and Juliet' with a happier ending

Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Kiran Desai's 'The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny' is expansive, immersive and a work of true distinction

- Somak Ghoshal

688 pages, Kiran Desai's new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, demands serious commitment from the reader—and it's not difficult to give it. Almost 20 years in the making, it is Desai's most ambitious book so far. Its richly imaginative world, accomplished craft, and immersive storytelling outshine her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker Prize in 2006, as well as her critically acclaimed debut, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, winner of the Betty Trask Award in 1998.

Sonia and Sunny, which is already on this year's Booker longlist, tells a sprawling story, both geographically and thematically. It unfolds across multiple generations, several cities in the US, India, Italy and Mexico, between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s. At its core, it grapples with questions of identity, politics, class dynamics, creativity and the invisible, yet fickle, forces that rule human lives.

Structurally the novel isn't flawless, though its audacious canvas is impressive. The prose takes a while to warm up, but when it does, it flows like a mountain stream, uninhibited even when faced with obstacles. Finally, there are many digressions along the way, often veering into quasi-occult or spooky zones—but it remains a page-turner till the end, serious and funny in turn, a chameleon-like entity of warmth and chill, where love is impossible to separate from hurt.

The story opens with Sonia Shah, who is studying creative writing at a college in Vermont in the US. She is "lonely," plunged into a bottomless well of misery, homesickness, and alienation. Back home in Delhi, her quarter-German mother and Gujarati father (Desai strews several autobiographical cues along the way), or her extended family of grandparents and a single aunt in Allahabad, cannot quite fathom the texture of this feeling. So, their antidote is to offer to arrange her marriage.