"When a writer is praised for having a sense of place, it usually means one specific place — a postage stamp of familiar ground rendered in loving, knowing detail. But Kiran Desai, in her latest novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, has a sense of places. This 670-page book, about the star-crossed lovers of the title and several dozen of their friends, relatives, exes and servants (there's a chart in the front to help you keep track), does anything but stay put."
"They stepped out into the city of water light and plash, their vision focused now that they had found each other again, and they saw a city of creatures — half human, half beast, dragged from the depths of a dream, mermaids and mermen loitering at sea-sprayed corners. They saw three tuberous faces at a window of a gloomy palazzo — possibly, according to Sunny's pursuit of literature, a comte, a principe, a baron, watching cormorants through binoculars."
The narrative follows Sonia and Sunny and a wide constellation of friends, relatives, exes and servants as they move between India, the United States, Mexico and Europe. Scenes shift from Allahabad/Prayagraj, Goa and Delhi to Queens, Kansas, Vermont, Mexico City and Venice, generating diverse cultural backdrops and episodic crises in the lovers' turbulent relationship. Venice functions as a hectic, dreamlike setting where sensory detail and grotesque human-animal imagery intensify romantic confusion. The prose lingers on elaborate visual vignettes, populated by eccentric figures and striking tableaux, producing expansive scope and episodic momentum across six hundred-plus pages.
Read at www.nytimes.com
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