BOOK CLUB: The many forms of exile
“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” author Kiran Desai joins us today to talk process, alienation, and whether love can make it all OK
Join the Book Club today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern for a live conversation with Kiran Desai, author of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. As if in a scene from the novel, Anand will be joining the discussion a few hours after returning from India, where his family just cremated and mourned his grandfather.
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Kiran Desai has said that with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, she set out to write “a modern-day romance that wasn’t necessarily romantic.” When we speak with her today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we will ask her what she meant by that. And for those of you who have already read the Ink Book Club’s December selection, do you think she’s succeeded?
Beyond the love story, Desai’s sublime third book is also an elegantly nuanced novel of ideas. Its primary characters are exiles in one way or another, whether from their families, their home countries, or their senses of self.
Sonia relocates to the United States to pursue her dream of becoming a fiction writer, but is suffused with a sense of loneliness and dislocation. She shares her despair by phone with her family in India, who are at a complete loss to understand her feelings:
Lonely? Lonely?
In Allahabad they had no patience with loneliness. They might have felt the loneliness of being misunderstood; they might know the sucked-dead feeling of Allahabad afternoons, a tide drawn out perhaps never to return, which was a kind of loneliness; but they had never slept in a house alone, never eaten a meal alone, never lived in a place where they were unknown, never woken without a cook bringing tea or wishing good morning to several individuals.
But Sonia is lonely, and she enters into a lopsided relationship with an egomaniacal artist who alternately fetishizes, adores her, and terrorizes her. He hectors her about what and how to write, urging her to avoid “orientalist nonsense” (he is white) and, above all else, not to write about arranged marriages. His is the white gaze made manifest.
Sunny is also from India, and lives in Brooklyn, an “idyll of triumphant multiracial calm” where he nonetheless is uncomfortable in his own skin. He views the U.S. as a country obsessed with race, where he will always be the outsider. He carefully edits his narration of life in America for his relatives back home so as not to reveal, for example, that he’s living with a white woman. Meanwhile, Babita — his mother — imagines her son does have an American girlfriend, whom she reflects she “would be proud to shepherd” about Delhi.
Desai’s genius — in addition to her breathtaking prose — is how her characters inhabit and reflect their complex postmodern, postcolonial world, and how present that is in their everyday experience. When Sonia’s parents sample French cuisine on a trip to Paris and wonder what all the fuss is about: “With these two sauces, the French have terrorized the world.”
There is also a deftness to it all, and humor in unexpected places. Part XIII of the novel, for example, is titled “Indians Cannot Be Cool.” On the page that follows, there is a conversation that goes like this:
Who are the cool Indians?” a teenager asks her father and his friend. “‘Indians cannot be cool,’ said the coolest of them, sporting large aviator frames and mandala tattoos, his hair in a greased ponytail. ‘They can be smart, they can be funny, Indians can be many things, but not cool.’
We hope you are enjoying The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and that it will help ease you into this busy holiday season, and offer a reminder that while there are those who seek to ban books and undermine culture, there are also enormously talented artists who remain unafraid to speak truth to power.
Ahead of our conversation, we invite you to share your questions for Kiran Desai and about The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny in the comments below. To get started, we leave you with some questions of our own, which you will find below the jump.
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