Hogarth
Review by Walter Cummins
When I read The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny I hadn’t known Kiran Desai had devoted twenty years to creating the novel, but I suspected a very long devotion to its making. It is so rich in information about people and places, about intricate family histories, about compelling realities, and about the evocation of intricate forces that I assumed hours of research, inventive writing, and careful revision.
In fact, Desai produced 5,000 pages of a manuscript that came down to 688 printed pages. While leading long periods of hermetic withdrawal, she turned out separate stories for all of the major characters and even some who ended up as minor presences. Then, as she explained in an interview, “I had to think what the book is really about. The title helped me focus.”
That is loneliness. The title characters are torn by the emptiness of depressing loneliness, but a version of loneliness haunts every major character. They crave a connection with people and places, as well as a home where they belong. Sonia and Sunny struggle to discover where that home is. They represent a generation of twenty-first century global Indians, educated in the United States, familiar with many of the world’s major cities, along with appealing resorts and villages. While their parents and elders have travelled, some widely, they are much more rooted in their Indian homes, now confronted with threatening changes to their lives and to the places that had been their fundamental reality.
The details invented for all of those discarded pages were not wasted. They provide a richness and a substance that gives these people a deep complexity and also provides a sense of close familiarity with the landscapes and dwellings they dwelt in for decades or for just for brief uprooted periods—Vermont, Delhi, New York, Goa, Venice, Mexico, and more.
Here’s Sonia in the Vermont winter: “Somewhere in the midst of those weeks and months, with storms barreling down from Canada or gaining momentum buffeting east across the Great Plains, Sonia fell headlong into the polar chill.”
Here’s Sonny in Mexico: “From Barra de Navidad, Sunny took a country rattletrap that labored among the fishing villages of the Costalegre, stopping where country paths emerged and country people stood waiting by the roadside with their heavy sacks and containers. ”
Sonia and Sunny in Venice: “She remembered two African American women on holiday in Venice sitting at a table adjoining Sunny and herself. They were lawyers from D.C. The waiter was flirting with them; light from the pink glass lamps in the piazza fell pink and gold on the canal; the water picked this light up and tossed it in a careless spaghetti upon the walls.”
Desai was certainly right when she said, “I think there is a strong sense of the unseen in this book and of foreboding.” It often is revealed in elements of magic realism, with objects and events that create a dark sense of threat. One of the most prominent is the shifting image and reality of a vicious white dog.
Pet dogs exist throughout the novel, but preparation for the danger ahead occurs when Ilan, Sonia’s much older and eventually demonic lover, buys her a kitschy figurine of two dogs at New York’s Chelsea Craft Fair, a gesture that seems playful. Ilan gives a voice to the bigger of the two, promising protection: “And I won’t let any harm come to you. If anyone dares to attack you, I will woof woof and drive them off.”
The morning after a dream of being murdered, lying on a Goan beach with Sunny, Sonia feels a breath on her foot, “and when she opened her eyes she saw a dog that had suddenly appeared—a huge, white, hairless hound with a harlequin face; had he been washed up by the waves as well?” After the hound bares its teeth, they walk away quickly, the dog trotting after them. When it lunges for Sonia, Sonny slaps its head with a slipper that the dog sinks teeth into while aiming for Sunny. Then it disappears.
Later in the Himalayas with her mother, Sonia confronts another fierce dog that reminds her of what she thinks of as the ghost dog, wondering if it has followed her. Later in Venice she discovers an exhibition of Ilan’s paintings, with one of her naked in sex, along with the seeming presence of the ghost dog: “… and projecting from the white space of the canvas, enclosing her, transfixing her, she saw a ghost hound in a harlequin hound mask of shadow and light.”
That hound, real or imaginary, haunts her. Ilan had painted it before the Goan discovery. Was it prophetic? Sunny’s bitten sneaker is evidence that it really existed, but—still—a figure, actual or imagined, pursues her. Finally, swimming in an ocean, fearing a riptide, Sonia feels another encounter with the dog and, exhausted, orders it to go way. Then, “And it did. It climbed inside her and vanished.” Is this a crucial escape, an ultimate healing? Or an infestation?
The ongoing threatening presence of this vicious beast is symptomatic of Desai’s technique, her characters suffering the tension of an uncertain danger that serves to isolate them in an existential loneliness. Can they find a way out?
