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.
