Love in the time of dislocation
When Kiran Desai was promoting her 2006 Booker-winning novel The Inheritance of Loss on a French news channel, she admitted that she was working on a book about “the loneliness of the globalised world, and the differences between the eastern and western notions of solitariness; all seen through a comic lens of a failed romance.” Almost twenty years later, that book has finally arrived. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny marks Desai’s long-awaited return, with the book already longlisted for the Booker Prize this year, where she gives loneliness a global outlook.
The story begins in 1996 with a phone call. Sonia, studying in a small American town, tells her grandparents in Allahabad that she is lonely. Her parents, who stay in Delhi, are too busy feuding with each other to notice, so the family in Allahabad proposes a cure: introduce her to Sunny, the grandson of their neighbour who lives in America, for companionship. But fate keeps them both apart. Instead, Sonia and Sunny spiral into America’s allure and alienation, caught up in romance, the mixups, and obsessions that only deepen their solitude. This long tale of varied solitariness is that of a world destined to collapse. Wars, memories, and migration shape the lives of these characters, who are consumed by the fragile hope of reconciliation.
Unlike Desai’s previous work, the story of Sonia and Sunny spans continents. A sense of displacement— beginning from Sonia’s ancestral house in Allahabad, to her life in Vermont, and then her home in Delhi—pervades the narrative. Desai is ambitious in destabilising the idea of space in this book. Loneliness, or solitariness, which is generally assumed to occur by being stagnated in one place, is played with artfully. With changing scenes and places, Desai gives loneliness a global face. In fact, Desai’s exploration of loneliness begins with the idea of running away in a world that forces us to keep moving, keep connecting, and yet leaves us feeling alienated. “An immigrant story is also a ghost story and a murder story. You become a ghost, the people left behind become ghostly, sometimes you kill them by the heartlessness of leaving, sometimes you psychically kill yourself,” Desai writes.
Desai’s literary oeuvre is filled with complex characters, and Sonia is perhaps the strongest of them all. An aspiring writer, Sonia’s desire to be loved and do well in life is captured well in her belief in a talisman given to her by her German grandfather for protection. Desai also references her first novel with a story that Sonia is trying to write of a young man who goes and resides in a tree because he thinks that he is a monkey.
Sonia’s bouts of vulnerability unfold when she meets a renowned painter and opens up about herself. “Why did she tell him such private details immediately? Because her condition of winter loneliness has grown acute…” Throughout the novel, we find Sonia wobbling through the murky territories of life as she deals with violence, manipulation, and a life that has become ‘a picnic among ruins’.
“When I look in the mirror, I can’t see my face,” Sonia admits to herself. Caught between continents, Sonia’s body is treated as an object—bejewelled by her father and often stripped by men—while she herself hovers in watchful unease.
The book captures Sunny and Sonia’s fractured journeys with vivid family portraits. Desai admits, “I wanted to write a present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty.” The book carries that old charm with the humour and sadness that resurface when one writes about Indian families. Mina Foi, Sonia’s aunt, and Babita Bhatia, Sunny’s mother, command the pages with theatrical presence.
Even as narrative sometimes meanders, Desai thrives in the excess—the seamless prose, the humour, the melancholy. Desai’s mad, criss-crossing world carries the charm that makes readers want to still reside a little more, no matter how long the story.
In the middle of the novel, one almost pauses and wonders the kind of ingenuity that must have gone into a craft of such nature. From the characters’ reading lists to their responses to incidents like 9/11 and the Godhra Riots of 2002, nothing feels rushed or vague.
In The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Desai has built a vast architecture of solitude, one that makes loneliness itself a living, breathing character. The book is not just a celebrated return of a literary giant, but the one that will make Kiran Desai one of the sharpest chroniclers of our restless, dislocated times.