Ilan de Toorjen Foss, an abusive European artist with a cheekily chosen name, makes only brief appearances at the beginning and end of Kiran Desai's wondrous, utterly heartfelt novel, but he's central to its theme in his role as a monstrous and manipulative overseer of Western culture. After all, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny ends up being exactly the book he forbids Sonia from writing while he's busily--and successfully--stealing her culture (and virginity) for himself.
We know from the outset that she's no fool, and probably inspired by the author, who won the Booker Prize more than two decades ago, at the ripe old age of 36. As Sonia writes in her thesis:
Superstition possessed the richness of art. A fantastic tale was another kind of mirror, another kind of metaphor, a way to expose larger-than-life brutalities, a rot beyond rational understanding, a way to say things about a dictator you could never say outright. Also, there was the practical purpose of being able to leap between times and places, to reveal patterns and connections beyond the reach of a realistic book in realistic time.
Desai has done just that and more in an "arranged" love story that explores multiple parental and other family perspectives as thoroughly as those of the protagonists, including their unquestioning acceptance of the caste system. As Sonny's Uncle Ravi says in an observation that captures the novel's meandering narrative:
Western psychology is no match for an Indian family. We are too slippery, we change shape, we don’t distinguish truth from lies. Lies are truth and truth are lies—you can’t pin us down.
Desai moves confidently between India and America with brief detours to Italy--including a dramatic reveal in the "obscure" Fortuny Museum, which I had visited just months earlier--and Mexico, where Sunny has taken refuge in a North American country populated by brown people at just the moment that America loses it innocence. Her characters' reactions to the September 11th terrorist attack--which intrude on their sympathies--are the gut reactions of people long traumatized both directly and indirectly by the global oppression of colonialism: now they know what if feels like to be on the receiving end.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny plunges readers into the worlds of two young Indians whose lives don't really seem to begin until they reach America as college students. The title characters are fulfilling the dreams of their parents, the first generation of south Asians who look to the United States rather than the United Kingdom for self-validation. Both fall into relationships with white people. Sonia's near enslavement to Ilan is uniquely scarring and does metaphorical duty with a significant dose of magical realism, while Sunny's infatuation with Ulla gives Desai an opportunity to generalize broadly about the dynamics of mixed relationships from the perspective a man with significantly more agency.
Sunny overheard Mala [a mutual friend] begin to denounce the disheartening and repetitive occurrence of Indian boys running after white American women, always picking the most pallid, androgynous ones, the kind who withdrew to spend moody hours scribbling in diaries. This was what attracted them, said Mala, because no Indian woman was bequeathed enough privacy to thus indulge herself with a solipsistic obsession over her own psychology—encouraged to chart the fluctuations of her temperament in response to deep crises that were inevitably banal. These women, meanwhile, realized they could snag a Third World man far higher up the ladder of class and money than any fellow white American, where their prospects were dim, simply by using the bargaining power of their citizenship and their pale complexion.
The question of how Sonia and Sunny will end their loneliness drives Desai's six-hundred plus page novel which never flags. It veers from scorching analysis to comic observation about the differences between Indian and American culture.
Why was it that in the Western world, snooping to uncover a crime was a worse crime than the actual crime! Ulla’s civilization was built upon not snooping and wandering about naked. Sunny’s civilization was based on donning your clothes and listening to every conversation.
* * * * *
While Sunny understood that Ulla was emphasizing that he had never invited her to join him on a trip to India, he was intrigued to be traveling to a part of the country that was unreachable to a foreigner, an America he could never see on his own. A mythic land imbued with memories of Dust Bowl poverty, of fields worked by migrant labor, of proms, sports heroes, and cheerleaders; six hours to the nearest mall; real cowboys swearing genuine curses on cattle farms; a black-sheep uncle covered in tattoos in a trailer park; an ancestor whose diary from the Civil War indicated he didn’t know which side he was fighting for, although he had carefully recorded each time he ate bacon.
* * * * *
All of us Indians who are educated to be Westernized are fated to make the same journey. If we have any intelligence or any heart, we have to search for ourselves backward. This was true of Gandhi, it was true of Nehru, it is true of me, and it will be true of your generation. You may think it a fine thing to be in America, and when you’re young, making your way, there’s enough reason to be anywhere in the world—but eventually you begin to wonder who you should have become instead of the person that you are.
* * * * *
He sat for a long time by his one window holding the miraculous piece of paper, experiencing the seismic shift to his fate from heaviness to lightness, weighing this lightness of being against the gravity of what had occurred, mulling, as if at an occasion where one simply does not know what to feel, what to think, how to behave—as at a circumcision, a loss of virginity, a rite of passage that is a wake and a celebration at the same time. He anticipated that no struggle would feel as important or real as this one. The green card would proceed staidly to citizenship, he’d live at an even farther, safer distance from true life, and life would never be quite real again.
In the end, Desai proves Thomas Wolfe, who wrote a classic American doorstopper about a young writer, wrong: you can go home again even if you have been successful in your pursuit of the Indian Holy Grail.
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