The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny : Kiran Desai (3.5/5.0)

 

3 min read

A maxim that I once read, and that has stayed with me - 'Don't write a 700 page book if u are not Vikram Seth'. Years later I might modify that to - or Abraham Verghese. But that is about how much I am willing to stretch it. At the outset, that is a test that this book fails. Having said that, Kiran Desai is an author I have always liked. I remember reading and enjoying The Inheritance of Loss when it won the Booker prize in 2006. 

As the name suggests, the book is about two privileged kids Sunny and Sonia, who despite all the advantages that life gives them, end up being mostly miserable. Sunny is raised by a single mother in a Panchsheel Park kothi in Delhi.He moves to the US, becomes a journalist of some sort and after leaving India, for some strange reason, enjoys the exotic poor people of New York. Sonia is also from Delhi. Her father is a caricature of a Punjabi businessman and her mother is a pahadi of Indo-German lineage. She studies liberal arts in a US university. The families are known to each other thru some Allahabad connection. When Sonia's Allahabad grandparents know of her unhappiness in the US, they try setting her up with Sunny. That doesn't work out, but they meet later on a train and a combination of loneliness and hormones are able to achieve what the grandparents could not. Some melodrama and a lot of Goa follows,  followed by a lot more of Mexico.

You would have figured out I am not crazy about how the story meanders. The interactions between Sunny and Sonia could have  taken more pages, considering the name of the book. I think an excessive number of pages were devoted to Goa - but atleast that had something to do with the protagonists. The whole bit about Mexico could have been eliminated to optimize the length of the book. It was as if  the author visited some village in Mexico, like it, and decided to just include it in this book. Not sure what the editor was being paid for.      

What saves the book is that Kiran Desai still remains a very good author. She writes well and her observations , specially those pertaining to immigrants or Indians abroad, are exceptionally sharp. In a specially good part, Sunny's upper class Delhi mother visits London. The bus driver, of asian extraction, tells her that all that she is seeing around her is stolen from colonies like India. She is horrified - that a bus driver is trying to find common cause with her, just because he shares her ethnicity. She wants to have nothing to do with the bus driver, as a representative of the 'haves' of Delhi she would rather find common cause with the white 'haves' of London. Another brilliant passage is when Sunny, despite being a NewYorker, feels a sense of justice in the 9/11 attacks. In this passage the author expresses the outrage that most of the Global South feels about America's bullying ways. I am writing this review as the world waits for Donald Trump's ridiculous, mafia style deadline for Iran is set to expire in a few hours. 

I have previously observed most author's magnum opuses tend to be at least somewhat autobiographical. So there could be some amount of Kiran Desai in Sonia. To begin with both have Indo-German mothers from Mussoorie. I am not sufficiently motivated to research beyond that. If someone does look into it, please share in the comments.

This is a good book from a talented writer. Might have been a very good book if it was 200 pages shorter. 

PS: In 2011 the Turkish nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk was at the Jaipur Literature Festival. After a session I tried approaching him for an autograph or something. He gave me as much notice as a Nobel laureate ought to give a random young fan - which is not much. But a pretty young Indian woman accompanying him noticed this and tried to make up for that by chatting me up. That woman accompanying Pamuk was his then girlfriend, Kiran Desai.          

The last testament of Oscar Wilde : Peter Ackroyd (3.5/5.0)

 

2 min read

Ireland has produced some of the most eminent authors in the English language, from Yeats to James Joyce. While the literary merits of Irish authors versus others can be a matter of debate, what is not a matter of debate is that most celebrated wits in the English language have been Irish. I don't think anyone else compares to GB Shaw and Oscar Wilde. 

I have been a fan of Oscar Wilde's ever since I read The Picture of Dorian Gray and then all the more after reading his comedies including the exceptional The importance of being Earnest.  So much so that I made a point of visiting the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, where he is buried, on my first visit to Paris.

Oscar Wilde had an aristocratic Irish upbringing, followed by a typical aristocratic English youth. That meant a degree from Oxford , trips to Paris and a lecture tour of America. Even before he found fame for his writing he found fame for being Oscar Wilde. He was a society fixture, like a 19th Century Orry.

However, what he was also known for then and to a large extent in posterity was his homosexuality. Specially his (in) famous court case and subsequent ignominy. Oscar Wilde did not take a lot of trouble hiding his fondness for young men (and boys). Like a lot of people with privileged birth and status, he thought he was above the rules of the contemporary society. One of his paramours was the son of the Marqués of Queensbury (known for framing the 'Queensbury Rules' that govern modern boxing). When Queensbury took  to  insulting Oscar Wilde about this, Wilde filed a court case for libel against the Marques. Oscar Wilde lost this case leading to imprisonment, bankruptcy and expulsion from society. He spent his final few years as a broken man in Paris. 

This book is a memoir from the point of view of this defeated and contemplative Oscar Wilde. It covers the whole of Wilde's life including his childhood, his success in London and his eventual downfall. It is interspersed with anecdotes from his final years in Paris.To a fan, while not an authority on Oscar Wilde, the voice in the book does seem like that of Oscar Wilde.. It has the wit and pomposity that one expects of Oscar Wilde.  One peculiar aspect of the book is that it it full of classical greek references. I am not sure if that is Wilde or Peter Ackroyd showing off.

Amongst the several gems in this book, there is a self referential critique of the memoir as a literary form. At one point all of Wilde's friends disagree with the facts presented in the book and implore him not to publish the book. This point is something the reader should always remember, whether the author is a fictional Oscar Wilde or a real Arundhati Roy. 

So, all in all, a good read.

PS: Picked this book on a whim, while casually strolling the Blossoms bookshop in Bangalore.

Butter : Asako Yuzuki ( 4.0/5.0)

 

2 min read

The vast majority of my reading of Japanese books (translations) consists of reading Murakami - who is a wonderful author. Apart from Murakami, I think I have read the brilliant Devotion of Suspect X and the old Honjin Murders. I think Murakami's works, while based out of Japan, inhabit a parallel world of their own. So those might not be a good place to understand Japan from. In that sense, this is the first book I have read about contemporary Japan.

The book's protagonist is a journalist, Rika Machida, who is fascinated with a new murder case. A woman, Manako Kajii, is accused of causing the death of three men. Kajii is alleged to have been in a sugar relationship with all of the victims. There is  intense public interest in the case, largely stemming from the fact that Kajii does not conform to the physical or moral standards expected of a Japanese woman. Rika uses Manako's love of food to bond with her and get an exclusive interview. Her association with Kajii leads Rika on an exploration of food, sex and relationships that makes her question her own life choices.  

This deceptively long book touches upon several themes. The city of tokyo and several of its neighbourhoods are described intimately. The searing coldness of its winters is brought to life and then compared with the separate cold of Nîgata in the north. The author gives us a peek into the hectic and competitive lives of journalists in Japan. Food is another major theme - Japanese as well as western. Not being a foodie, the bits on food were a little too much for me. Some details on cutting and cooking of animals were simply gross for a vegetarian. The main theme of the book, however, is the place of young Japanese women in a changing supposedly modern society. There seems to be an  expectation from young women of being thin, hard working and yet have time for a family. Though men don't have it easy either in terms of pressure or expectations. 

However this is not a moralizing or even a feminist book. Unlike some of those books the author does not claim to have figured out the answers to the questions of modern society. Should women not care about the expectations from society ? Should they get away from the rat race and focus on family ? The protagonists are constantly struggling with similar questions and and coming to different conclusions at different points in the book. There is also a discussion on the question of sex in marriage and the broader role familiarity as it relates to the sexual act. This is not something I have seen addressed in many places. 

While this long  book starts like a murder mystery or a thriller it eventually unfolds as a complex exploration of japanese society - or even the broader modern society. At some points the complexity is such that its has shades of Dostoyevsky. I didn't find it an easy book to complete and the rating I have given is more for novelty and complexity than pleasure.