Book Review: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
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Wani Nazir reviews Booker Shorlisted title The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai.
Thoughts and emotions are always the main concern of Desai’s fiction. She explores how silence and desire can shape a person’s life as surely as visible success. In an interview, Desai herself told Vogue, “I can’t write unless I disappear from myself,” and on another occasion, discussing her book, she averred, “I wanted to explore various forms of loneliness.”
At the heart of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is loneliness. Desai presents us with two people who suffer in rather different ways, and to the extent she offers up anything, it is what it means to be a person in a broken world. Their loneliness — or “loneliness,” as their stories often underline, for the air quotes around that word are always perceptible in these narratives — is more than a fleeting condition.
