Author Kiran Desai’s latest novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.Yuki Iwamura/The Associated Press
When Kiran Desai bagged the 2006 Booker for her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, an instant classic of diasporic literature, she became the youngest novelist to win that prize. The win also marked the completion of a heartwarming intergenerational literary relay, Desai’s mother, Anita Desai, having been thrice Booker nominated, but never a winner herself.
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This and a host of other accolades did not, apparently, create a sense of momentum. Desai’s “follow-up,” The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny – an epic romance liberally peppered with Dickensian subplots and family dramas set against a global canvas (Vermont, Delhi, New York, Goa, Italy) – recently arrived on store shelves, 20 years later.
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Readers haven’t been bothered by the wait. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny has received glowing reviews and, wouldn’t you know it, has also been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Desai spoke to The Globe from her home in Brooklyn, N.Y.
People get very excited about big books. Did you set out to write one?
No, it grew in scope when I started writing about all the family stories that informed Sunny and Sonia’s story. I wanted to write about two Indians out in the big world, so I knew that the book would include several geographies, and that part of the book would be about how their sense of self changes as they travel to these different places.
And then when I decided I would structure it on the theme of loneliness, not just romantic loneliness, I realized that there was an underlying theme. I was thinking also of sought-out, restorative loneliness – Western individuality or Eastern spirituality – all of these different things we seek out a loneliness for. Then I realized that the book was growing larger and larger and larger.
I could say that perhaps I was not very disciplined. A lot of other authors would just say, “You can’t put everything into a book.” Or they choose beforehand more carefully what they’re going to do. I gave myself this enormous amount of time. But then, of course, it was hard because I had all of this material that I had to whittle down. I had to cut and splice all these different stories together.
It wouldn’t be a romance if something or someone didn’t conspire to keep the lovers apart: moral codes, fate, class, family et cetera. Those forces seem especially complex in this book. How would you describe them?
Well, Sonia has this very abusive relationship in her college years. And that darkness is following her: a hallucinatory fear that she can’t trust the world she’s living in.
Both come from what would count as a very westernized background in India. They’ve grown up not even touching their own country, is what Sunny says. He’s grown up never taking a public bus, never eating on the street. He comes to the United States where he does those things. He has English as his first language.
Kiran Desai weaves a rich story of loneliness and family in her long-awaited third novel
The normal story is that Indian parents want their children to marry other Indians. A horror story is when they bring the foreigner home. But in this westernized class, it’s not so. They want their children to come back with a white partner. They love the idea of them joining the big, white world. Something ancient has been moving them along from the time of the British in India. There’s an unbroken connection to that journey. So that was interesting for me to explore.
But soon they’re coming across this kind of unknowing, and finding themselves a bit unknowable to themselves. They’re changing in ways they don’t recognize. Those are really the gaps that keep them apart. It’s a world of phantoms.
Right. It’s like the characters are in a kind of perpetual grass-is-greener mode: When they’re in the U.S. they yearn for India, and vice versa. No doubt this is something all immigrants feel to a degree. But is there an aspect of it, do you think, that’s unique to the Indian diaspora?
It is true that the lifestyle is very, very different. If I were writing about more conservative, traditional families, then I wouldn’t be able to explore this combination of two different ways of living and thinking. In India, Sonia and Sunny don’t really belong to the society any more. They’re sort of left behind Anglophiles in a way.
They’re negotiating all of this all the time. But in India life is so full of people. You’re never alone. You might experience the loneliness of being trapped in a situation you don’t want to be in. But it’s not a loneliness of being physically alone. My experience growing up in India was always desperately trying to be alone so I could read.
One of the scenes I took out was based on my travels attending one of these non-profit groups with women from the Western world and women from India. They went around in a circle and talked about what their deepest fears were.
I remember a woman from New York saying, “I’m so lonely. I’ve never managed to find a romantic partner.” And the Indian women were laughing and saying couldn’t get rid of the men in their lives.
So, just that basic fact of people living their entire lives, never sleeping or even being in a room alone, or never ever eating alone, let alone the unthinkable of going to go to a movie alone, and then traversing to a place where they may be more alone than not.
You’ve spoken before about relishing solitude, which is part and parcel of the writer’s life. But do you also sometimes feel loneliness?
Yes, absolutely. I feel all of these different moods of it and shades of it.
Sometimes it’s hard to travel alone, for example. And sometimes you don’t have the company you want and you’re by yourself. At the same time, I treasure the lack of self-consciousness when I come home where there are no eyes on me at all. That kind of privacy helps when you’re sitting down at your desk to work. There’s a freedom in it that I don’t take lightly.
Parent-child relationships are an important part of this book, and I know you’re very close to your mom. How is she?
She’s really very frail. She’s 88 and no longer travelling – I’m going to go see her after this interview, actually. But she’s as sharp as anything.
Did she read the book when it was a work in progress?
She did. I was actually looking at the notes she wrote, which were incredibly careful and included things like cut this section, or at least shorten it – underlining “shorten” a few times over [laughs]. She knows the landscapes I was writing from, and could intuit what I was trying to say, I think.
She’s also very, very kind. She’s motherly first. As a parent you could crush a child. The competitive spirit comes out in all of us. But she just does not have it at all. I’m incredibly lucky.
This interview has been edited and condensed.