Cwith his debut book, Heirs of defeatKiran Desai struck straight away, surprisingly winning the Booker Prize. It was 2006 and it took her almost twenty years to return with her long-awaited second novel, The Solitude of Sonia and Sunny. Daughter of art (also her mother Anita, one of the most popular Indian authorshas been nominated for the Booker three times, and is its first reader), has dedicated all her time to writing this complex work, over 700 pages, which starts from an unusual love story and then interweaves a myriad of other themes.
Moving from America to India, up to Italy, he explores emotions and the search for identity, confronts the emptiness of contemporary solitude, observes cultures and family traditions crumbling, weaves together stories and minor characters with the addition of touches of magical realism, including supernatural apparitions and the mystery of a symbolic talisman.
The two main protagonists are two young Indians, luxury emigrants, sent to America by their families for university studies: Sonia is an aspiring writer, lives in a college in Vermont and finds herself entangled in a toxic relationship with an artist who is twice her age; Sunny, on the other hand, would like to succeed as a journalist in New York, where she is interning and struggling with the oppression of a tyrannical mother. While they both reject their parents’ attempt to arrange their marriage, it will instead be chance that makes them meet and fall in love.
Kiran Desai was born in New Delhi. Daughter of art, together with her mother Anita she is among the best-known Indian writers. With her first novel, “Heirs of Defeat”, she won the Booker Prize in 2006. (Photo by David Levenson/Getty Images)
From what point did you start to develop such a rich and complex skein?
My first idea was to write something on the topic of contemporary loneliness. Gradually it became natural for me to propose it through the lens of romance. Because ultimately if you write about loneliness, you also write about love, people often see them as the opposite of each other.
But then the themes multiplied…
My first book was very political: a love story for me was almost a transgressive choice. And also a little embarrassing. But I still wanted it to be a diverse exploration, a look at society, at family differences and between generations. I don’t think anyone has yet written an Indian love story immersed in the globalized world, two young people who on the one hand were raised to live far away, in a modern world, but on the other still have to deal with rules and traditions that continue to exist in their homeland.
Like arranged marriage for example?
Yes, in India it is still very common, most unions are of this type, it is a way to keep class, caste, community intact. Even if it is not obligatory: my parents’ marriage, for example, was a love marriage, whereas for two of my father’s sisters it was their families who arranged the meetings.
Which India does it tell about?
The novel is set between the 80s and 90s, because it is a period in which there was a reality that I still felt close to the one in which I grew up, but which is fading. It would be more difficult for me to talk about India today, it has changed very quickly.
The loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, Adelphi, 762 pages, €25
For better or worse?
Yesterday was perhaps an imperfect country with many problems, but we took it for granted that it was a secular space where people of different religions and beliefs were able to live side by side. We didn’t think in terms of minorities. In the evenings in my parents’ living room, I never wondered if their friends were Muslims, Sikhs or Christians. They were a mix of everything. Today, minorities live in fear because there is a wave of violence against them and a rise of nationalism.
Did you also suffer from loneliness by dedicating yourself to this book for so long?
From a certain point of view, yes, but it’s something I chose: it’s a constant condition, as if I had moved my loneliness into the novel. A job that completely absorbed me, every day, pursued with extreme stubbornness and dedication. I almost angrily resisted anyone who tried to distract me. And I never got tired of doing it because it made me happy.
Were you afraid to write the final word?
It was very difficult to let go: I couldn’t find a way to tie together all the threads of the stories that seemed satisfactory to me. It was probably just because I knew that after I finished it, there wouldn’t be much life for me outside. I skipped entire phases, I was a thirty-year-old woman when I started, I found myself over 50. I had to reinvent myself and look for new projects and things that I’m passionate about. Today I find myself at a crossroads: do I want to live or start writing another book?