BOOK CLUB: Family drama? We're okay with that.
Julian Brave NoiseCat and Kiran Desai wrestle with identity and parentage -- and find reconciliation and belonging
Looking forward to our conversation with We Survived the Night author Julian Brave NoiseCat, I’m struck by how he was able to turn his greatest vulnerability — the absence of his father — into a strength. The fear of losing him, NoiseCat writes, was “a feeling that goes straight from my heart to my stomach, where it lodges like a hunk of moldy cheese.” Until he was five, he reflects, “I felt like I had the coolest dad in the world. But suddenly, I had this creeping suspicion that Dad wasn’t so committed to being my dad. The feeling shot through my body.”
In choosing to write We Survived the Night and to co-direct Sugarcane, he reclaims both his father and his ancestry, and indeed, he dedicates the book to Ed Archie NoiseCat: “Dad,” he writes, “This book is an honor song for you.”
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is also about the quest to understand where one belongs, what identity means, and to better understand who one’s parents are and why they’ve done what they’ve done. The titular characters, Sonia and Sunny, are India-born but have come to live in the United States, where they feel a profound sense of dislocation. Neither sets out to return home, but they recognize a missing piece, an ache they don’t know how to soothe — until, back in India, a train journey brings them together.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny author Kiran Desai was born in New Delhi, then at the age of 14 moved with her mother, the writer Anita Desai, first to England, and then to the United States, where she still lives. How much of her novel — which was a finalist for the Booker Prize — is derived from her experience?
Identity and purpose are the central quests in these otherwise vastly different books, themes we will explore when we meet with both authors over the next two weeks. We’ll meet with Julian Brave NoiseCat this Wednesday, December 3, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, for an “ask the author anything” session. Then, next Wednesday, December 10, also at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be speaking with Kiran Desai.
Also, thanks to all of you who weighed in on what you are reading and what books you’ve most enjoyed this year — keep them coming! During December, we’ll be sharing more of your suggestions, as well as our own and those of some of our Ink Book Club authors.
In the meantime, we leave our Book Club members with some questions to consider.
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