Kiran Desai’s novel documents the journeys of two young people, Sonia and Sunny , as they struggle to find and accept the cross sectionality that constitutes their identities. Their journeys take them to different continents -from India to the USA, then to Italy and later Mexico. Desai confesses that the novel took her over a decade to write which explains the voluminous nature of this writing; it has some 75 chapters and it takes about 25 hours to listen as an audio book. However, it is credit to Desai’s tightly controlled narrative and evocative language skills that the reader is held captive by her storytelling. The novel is a very compelling read despite the numerous characters, the multiple storylines that run parallel, and the variety of settings. The one thing that may detract from this writing is that it is Indocentric, in that it would definitely appeal more to the Indian audience than any other; both the characters , Sonia & Sunny, are of Indian origin and have immediate family in India. This makes me wonder if an American or British reader would be as taken and held by this lengthy novel.
In her earlier novel, “The Inheritance of Loss”, Desai explored ‘loss’ in multitudinal circumstances, and in this novel she does the same with ‘loneliness’. The novel documents the loneliness of an artist grappling with his loss of creativity, as it does the loneliness experienced by a wife and a husband due to the breakdown of communication between them while living in a ‘joint family setting’. We get to see a lonely foreign student from India braving the brutal winter alone in a college dorm in Vermont while her counterparts, the local students are doing internships in warmer places. All of Desai’s characters appear to be blanketed in loneliness of some sort. Even Sunny, a budding journalist in NYC has but one ‘real friend’, is unable to connect with his own mother, and consequently is very lonely. One would imagine that a novel ch as this, one that documents the loneliness of so many individuals, would be pretty dreary and depressing, but surprisingly it is anything but that. Desai’s nuanced writing and her ability to interweave characters and storylines in tantalizing ways makes for a narrative that is gripping and very evocative.
I loved reading this novel and would recommend it in a heartbeat.
Iditis 