"The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny" by Kiran Desai
- Raji Writes
- 2 minutes ago
- 5 min read
“Cut. If not, shorten.” Anita Desai wrote these words in the margins of an early draft of her daughter Kiran Desai’s latest book, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hogarth, Sept 2025.) This was after the author had cut down a staggering 5000-page manuscript to a still-hefty 1000. Yet, at 688 pages, the published version is still too long, in this reader’s opinion.
Desai discussed the book, which has been shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, at a Sept. 21 event at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park. The engaging conversation was moderated by her friend and fellow writer, Ellen Sussman. Introducing the event. Heather Birchall of Kepler’s commented that when Desai won the Booker Prize in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss, she was at the time the youngest female winner at 34.
A winter of “exquisite, artistic loneliness” at Bennington College in Vermont, where she was a student years ago, inspired the novel, Desai said, describing many different kinds of loneliness: romantic, existential, and the loneliness that comes from racial, gender, and national differences.
Raised to leave India
Born into privileged upper-class Indian families in North India with the usual retinue of cooks and maids, Sonia and Sunny are “raised to leave India.” Their families attempt to set them up for an arranged marriage when Sonia is a lonely college student in Vermont, and Sunny is an AP reporter in New York, living with his midwestern girlfriend, Ulla. This attempt fails, and they go on with their respective lives.
Sonia moves to New York and enters a relationship with a brooding, self-absorbed, abusive artist, Ilan. Sunny’s closest friend, Satya, a physician in training, takes the plunge to have an arranged marriage, and wants Sunny to help him select his bride. Sonia and Sunny meet serendipitously later on in India, and a sweet romance begins. Is it easy from then on? No.
The quest for love and writing
Sussman pointed out that every time Sonia and Sunny come together, something pulls them apart, which made her wonder if love could fix that. Both protagonists are writers, wanderers looking at how to fit into the world. Commenting that the book is also about writing, Sussman quoted Sonia: “I am trying to write a book, in fact, but I feel I am circling the story. I see a glimpse here and there, like a fin, a ripple, but I can’t see the whole beast. I can’t put the center in the center. I wonder if I have to write all my stories to reveal it.”
The description “circling the story” for me applied to this book. Many sentences go on and on, and seem less a device to explore the character’s thinking than the author’s attempt to nail down a thought. At times, it is meditative with a lulling quality, but all those words don’t always serve the narrative. The characters’ musings are expressed in the form of questions that occupy entire paragraphs. This frequent, mostly unresolved head-scratching and hand-wringing can be wearying.
Brief, striking sentences stand out. For instance: “The train began to clop to a tabla beat,” and “An aberrant ice cube harboring a bubble of air begins to squeal in the glass and spin around like a dervish. The sky turned pink, and a sickle moon rose above the traffic.” These sparkle like diamonds in vast expanses of unremarkable text.
Whose Gaze, and For Whom
The approach to racial relations and justice was thought-provoking: reflections on a brown person writing about brown people/culture for a white audience. Memorably, the response of an acquaintance in New York to Sunny when he mentioned that he would seek American citizenship was that it would change his perspective as a reporter about the people he was writing about: “You will lose your understanding of the majority of humanity, the side you need to advocate for.” The desire to fit in can present itself in the mutual disparagement by Indian men and women who “say all the bad things about the country so white people didn’t have to.”
When the characters muse about orientalism or criticize writings about arranged marriages, it was not always clear to me whose voice it is, the characters’ or the author’s.
Many significant world events punctuate the narrative: 9/11, the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the burning of the train in Godhra, and a brief reference to the generational trauma resulting from the India-Pakistan Partition; these are more from a distance and to anchor the characters’ lives in specific times than on account of any of them being directly affected, and the inclusion seems superficial.
Magical Realism
Desai spoke of an introduction she wrote for an exhibition by Francesco Clemente, “Emblems of Transformation” (Francesco Clemente: Emblems of… | Exhibitions | MutualArt). As a gift, he sent her an image that she loved —a demon deity figure — which she placed at the center of the book. Yet, the amulet with Badal Bala was “an old-fashioned plot device,” and Desai expressed embarrassment at this before speaking about how magical realism is useful: it’s a way to move in time, approach topics indirectly, and talk about people falling out of reality. Over time, the amulet becomes a haunting.
While magical realism has been used to stunning and creative effect in other esteemed books (Marquez, Rushdie, Martel, Karunatilaka), I cannot say it is this book’s great strength. The elements of magic realism: the hound, a “presence” under the ocean, and a morphing Badal Baba, all glom together at the end and become sort of mumbo-jumbo.
A Naturalist’s Eye
Desai writes with a naturalist’s eye, quiet, watchful, observant, calm, and transports us to the places she describes. “Sunny got up when what sounded like a forest of doves began to call and a pure apricot light broke over land that was the color of agave.” And again, “he passed a goat herder who lived in a hut under a flowering pepper tree, dense with the buzzing of bees.”
The descriptions of quirky houses and buildings are similarly keenly observed: water pooling in the corner of a bathroom, the unusual openings in ceilings which allow voices to travel between rooms and entire conversations to be carried on, tunnels under an old property in Goa, the windows of a college library in Vermont in the cold winter months.
Yet, the people are not described quite as closely: we get to know them more through their personality traits and quirks rather than their physical characteristics.
Resilient Mothers, Loneliness
While I admired the slow, methodical way in which the personalities of the characters are developed, it took me a while to feel invested in any of them. Desai is pitch perfect with the older women who dance to their own tune and whom I admired despite their shortcomings: Sonia’s mother (whose name we never learn as she is called Mama throughout the book,) living her life in a mountain retreat, and Babita, Sunny’s mother, imperious and calculating, charting her path without her husband and son.
“Loneliness could mean abiding peace,” Sonia’s mother contends. Babita, in contrast, wonders why we try to solve other problems when there is only one that is necessary to solve – loneliness – and goes on to say, “the other problems would melt away in importance.” Indeed, this was the thesis of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s 2021 book on loneliness: Together, The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, reviewed here.
At the book signing after the event, Desai was warm, friendly, and gracious — noting my Advance Reader’s Copy, she commented with a smile that it was “cool” – a gentle person whom one instinctively wishes well.
This review was published in India Currents on October 14, 2025.