Kiran Desai’s ambitious new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, published by Penguin Hamish Hamilton, immediately stands out for two reasons: its remarkable length of nearly 700 pages and the almost two decades it took her to write it. (Note: Kiran Desai previously won the Man Booker Prize in 2006 for her second novel, ‘The Inheritance of Loss.’)
In a recent Zoom conversation, I inquired about the interplay between these two significant factors. Unlike many voluminous books, Sonia and Sunny doesn’t overwhelm with incessant events. Instead, it unfolds with a lifelike rhythm, at times gracefully slow, at others briskly energetic. Desai meticulously refined thousands of pages to arrive at the compelling 688-page final version.
Desai explained that each time she removed a narrative thread, she felt compelled to reread the entire manuscript to ensure the pacing and emotional shifts remained cohesive. She described her creative process as ‘intuitive,’ a term that frequently surfaced in our discussion. Clearly, Desai is not an ‘architect-writer’ who designs a novel with rigid blueprints.
(An Instagram post from The Booker Prizes shows a reel discussing the novel.)
Literary critic Chris Power characterized Sonia and Sunny as a work that explores and embodies ‘the tension between two paths for Indian fiction, social realism and magical realism.’ Desai acknowledges this description, which becomes even clearer with Sonia reading the realist classic Anna Karenina while Sunny delves into Pedro Paramo, a foundational text of magical realism. Interestingly, Desai revealed that the novel she initially planned was ‘completely realistic.’ She admitted to being cautious, much like her character Sonia, of being labeled yet another Indian author selling the ‘hokey realm’ of the fantastical. However, she ultimately found it impossible to ‘encompass the entire human experience’ without incorporating elements of the ‘hallucinatory’ and ‘demonic.’
Ocean of Demons
Desai explained that the ‘unseen world’ and the ‘esoteric’ form the connective tissue and underlying structure of Sonia and Sunny. The surface plot intricately coexists with this ‘shadow world,’ a realm particularly challenging for Sonia. Both Sonia and Sunny are writers—one a novelist, the other a journalist—and Sonia often feels like an authorial alter ego, reminiscent of Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman. A striking detail is that in this third-person novel, Sonia’s family members are referred to by their relationship to her (‘Mama,’ ‘Dadaji,’ ‘Mina Foi’), while Sunny’s mother is simply Babita. This narrative choice makes Sonia almost appear to be the novel’s true narrator.
The concept of Sonia as an alter ego presented ‘a real battle’ for Desai, who explicitly stated she had no desire to write a ‘meta’ novel. Yet, she concedes that after imbuing Sonia with key biographical details and making her a novelist, she began to playfully consider, though never fully embrace, the idea of Sonia being the actual author of the book.
(An image shows Kiran Desai working on her manuscript in Mexico during the early years of writing ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.’)
Even so, Sonia’s struggles mirror Desai’s own. Desai expressed her interest in the type of writer Sonia could become after conquering the significant hurdles in her path. These obstacles are not merely the common writerly frustrations of unsupportive publishers or indifferent readers. Quoting the Buddha, Desai articulated, ‘You have to go through the ocean of demons to get to the other side.’ In Sonia’s narrative, this demonic presence is embodied by the cosmopolitan painter, Ilan de Toorjen Foss.
Reviewers have characterized Ilan as an ‘art monster,’ a term that pleasingly reminds us of literature’s capacity to enrich everyday language (the phrase originated from Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation). However, Desai finds this description too simplistic for Ilan. She agrees that Ilan is ‘totally a villain,’ a literal personification of evil in the world. Desai observes that as children, we encounter such clear-cut evil in fairy tales, but later we are taught that novels should avoid binary distinctions of good and evil. ‘At a certain point,’ she reflects, ‘midway through life in my experience — we realize there is really evil, and those children’s stories were right all along.’ To fully acknowledge the presence of evil and the demonic, Desai ultimately felt she needed to transcend the limitations and conventions of the modern novel and contemporary psychology.
Uses for Nostalgia
Despite these fantastical elements, Sonia and Sunny contains a rich tapestry of classic realism. Much like the monumental 19th-century novels War and Peace and Middlemarch, it functions as a historical novel, set an entire generation before its publication (concluding in 2002, a year when most present-day Indians were either children or not yet born). The novel lovingly, yet unsentimentally, reconstructs an entire material and cultural world.
(A YouTube video from The Booker Prizes features an interview with Kiran Desai.)
Desai explained that the book concluded at that specific point purely for reasons of scope; it was already sufficiently long. However, she emphasized her desire to trace the generational arc from her grandparents’ era—who abandoned their faith and Gujarati identity for ‘a new sense of belonging, secular democracy’—to her own generation, where she observed those foundational values being ‘undone.’ As a child visiting Allahabad from Delhi, Desai’s family seemed ‘almost as provincial figures of fun’ to her. Yet, by the time she embarked on Sonia and Sunny, she was filled with immense admiration for their journey from Gujarat to Allahabad (via England) and their enthusiastic assimilation of their new home’s culture, especially its cuisine.
‘There are uses for nostalgia,’ she asserted, defending it as a misunderstood concept. ‘It is a dirty word but it shouldn’t be, so long as you [also] show the darker sides.’ A novel, she believes, ‘can work as a museum, and this novel feels like a museum of a past India.’ She drew a parallel between her endeavor in Sonia and Sunny and Nabokov’s impulse to write Speak, Memory: a profound desire to meticulously preserve a cherished past in written form.
By ending the narrative when she does, Desai avoids writing about an India she admits she no longer truly knows. Quoting John Grady from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, she remarked: ‘It’s a good country, but it ain’t my country anymore.’ Grady’s subsequent admission of not knowing what his country is resonates with Desai, who describes herself as ‘a person without a country.’ Despite having lived in the U.S. since her teenage years, she confesses to being quite intrigued by the enduring hold India maintains on her imagination. This suggests that readers can hopefully anticipate more Indian-inspired works from her in the future.