This Booker-shortlisted novel is about work as much as it is about the relationship between Sunny Bhatia and Sonia Shah, whose families are neighbours and whose attempts to make a match begin their on-off liaison. Where Sunny dreams of journalistic success, Sonia’s heart and mind lie in writing fiction. The dilemma facing an Indian writer, she ponders, is one of obeisance to the west’s appetites and projections.
Desai’s solution to the problem in this immensely entertaining and generative novel is to dart continually between modes of representation and register. The gothic novel appears with the early introduction of the monstrous Ilan de Toorjen Foss, a narcissistic artist who seduces Sonia, suppresses her literary endeavours and then abandons her. The predicaments and predilections of Sunny and Sonia’s Allahabad relatives create a low-key bourgeois comedy: stranded single aunts, genteel impoverishment, the wrangle over a cook famed for his kebabs.
Capacious and shape-shifting though the novel is, filled with subtexts and shadow narratives, it is still a challenge to hold the contradictions and demands of multiple identities. Desai pictures Sonia and her father listening to the Pakistani singer Iqbal Bano, and reflecting on what the music conjures in them: “To be a citizen of a troubled postcolonial nation gave a person gravitas. To be holding out against the crass new world gave a man gravitas.
To be wounded yet fighting on against the barbarians gave one gravitas. To be exiled, abandoned by love and luck, gave them gravitas. What happened within a family, what happened between a couple, was no different from that which happened in a nation under dictatorship, running on fear.” Whether or not a novel can accurately and productively capture this yearning for gravitas, or the continuum between the personal and the political, is one of the questions posed by The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.
Another is the sheer exhaustion – mental, physical and artistic – caused by the constant need for self-invention and reinvention, whether individual, societal, national or global; and how the form of the novel, created in the European consciousness, can complexify itself to take account of an accelerated, fractured modernity. Desai’s answer to these questions is to make her story both dizzyingly vast and insistently miniature; to make us feel that there is as much at stake in the lives of Vini-Puri, a pair of servant girls not even accorded single-name recognition, as in the grand ambitions of the novel’s title characters. She pulls it off, not only in her manoeuvring of cast and incident, but in her ability to elicit apprehension, laughter, compassion and curiosity in the reader.
Alex Clark £11.04 (RRP £12.99) – purchase at the Guardian bookshop We Love You, Bunny, is the much-anticipated sequel to Mona Awad’s beloved campus horror/satire of 2019, Bunny. Both books are set at an Ivy League university in a crime-ridden New England town; from various well-seeded clues, we can identify this as Brown University. Here it is called Warren, because the Bunnyverse is unabashedly silly and self-referential.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
