Twenty years on from winning the Booker Prize with The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai returns with a vast masterpiece of a love story which has been longlisted for this year’s prize.
Our two protagonists, Sonia and Sunny, come from wealthy neighbouring families in Allahabad, but both are in America when the novel begins. Sonia is in Vermont, working for the college library while finishing her studies, and Sunny is in New York, as a reporter for the Associated Press. When Sonia flees a coercive relationship after suffering depression and Sunny agrees to help a childhood friend choose a bride, they both return to India, where they encounter one another on a train from Delhi to Allahabad. There follows an illicit meeting on Sonia’s veranda, then a trip to Goa – promising, until they are chased from the water by ‘a huge, white, hairless hound with a harlequin face’, who savages Sunny’s sandal and then disappears ‘like vapour’. As their love contends with powerful forces of ambition and corruption, family ties and neighbourly feuds, cultural alienation and sexual violence, Desai skilfully traces their paths as they twist together and apart.
Loneliness, as the title suggests, is at the heart of the story. In a poignant and provocative interrogation, Desai suggests that this feeling is a product of the dissonance between India and America, endured by people who have moved from the former to the latter. She posits that Sonia’s parents in Allahabad cannot understand it because
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.
Sunny, meanwhile, struggles with his decision to be a ‘cheating outsider’ in writing about India to further his prospects in America.
Desai also travels beyond the India-America dichotomy, taking her characters to a devastatingly unromantic Venice, as well as, intriguingly, to Mexico. She has written of ‘the importance for artists in countries previously in communication through a former colonial power now to communicate directly’, and that Mexico had ‘something to say to India, not just to the United States’. When Sonia’s precious lost amulet is linked to the sinister ‘ghost hound’, Indian and Mexican cultures come together, creating a potent uncanniness and vivid magical realism.
Desai conjures other strains of loneliness, too. She binds her female characters in the dangerous isolation suffered by women caught in a predatory, violent male gaze; she allows Sonia’s mother to find an ‘abiding peace’; and she portrays the punishing, exacting solitude demanded by a creative vocation – another theme of the novel. This multi-faceted exploration of loneliness is emblematic of how the author resists reducing experience to a definitive singularity, celebrating plurality and individuality instead.
Sonia, struggling to write a magazine feature, reflects: ‘This was India… You might try to write a slender story, but it inevitably connected to a larger one.’ So with this novel. Desai has written an enthralling love story that blooms to encompass so much more: a magnificent portrait of alienation, creativity and the immense difficulty of finding a home.
Comments