{"id":33021,"date":"2025-09-20T09:47:04","date_gmt":"2025-09-20T09:47:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/33021\/"},"modified":"2025-09-20T09:47:04","modified_gmt":"2025-09-20T09:47:04","slug":"kiran-desai-i-never-thought-it-would-happen-in-the-us-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/33021\/","title":{"rendered":"Kiran Desai: \u2018I never thought it would happen in the US\u2019 | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not long after the novelist Kiran Desai published her second book, The Inheritance of Loss<\/a>, which won the Booker prize in 2006, she began working on her third. The title, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny<\/a>, came to her quickly, and she knew she wanted to write a \u201cmodern-day romance that wasn\u2019t necessarily romantic\u201d, one as much concerned with the forces that keep us apart \u2013 class, race, nationality, family history \u2013 as those that bind us. Writing the book itself took almost two decades.<\/p>\n

One problem with devoting so many years to one book is that people worry for your welfare, Desai says with a laugh. \u201cPeople begin to wonder what\u2019s wrong. Are you really working on something?\u201d One neighbour \u2013 who observed how Desai would rise early each morning to write, eat her breakfast and lunch at her desk, take a short break to do her food shop or housework\u00a0and then write until as late as she could manage in the evenings \u2013 attempted an intervention. \u201cYou need to come out of your house,\u201d he told her. \u201cYou will go crazy writing a book! This is no way to live!\u201d Her 90-year-old uncle observed, with affection, that she was starting to look \u201clike a kind of derelict\u201d, which she acknowledges was true. \u201cIt was becoming absurd!\u201d And yet Desai says she loved living this way, in complete service to her writing.<\/p>\n

At times she sounds mystified by why the writing took so long. The book runs to almost 700 pages, \u201cbut then I also have to think there are authors who write books this long several times over. Look at Hilary Mantel or Dickens or Tolstoy.\u201d Perhaps, she muses, \u201cI was just writing this book over and over, and letting it take different forms.\u201d By around 2013 her notes had swelled to 5,000 pages, and she puzzled over which strands she should extract and weave into a story. How far back in time should she travel, and how far forward? How far outwards should she expand from Sonia and Sunny to explore the lives of their friends and relatives?<\/p>\n

This feels like the big book of my life. I don\u2019t have time to do it again<\/p>\n

Even when these questions felt unresolvable, she kept working. \u201cIt was just a stubbornness that I cannot explain,\u201d she says. \u201cI become very determined and very stubborn and not very nice if I am kept away from my writing.\u201d She feels \u201clucky\u201d that she was able to work with such intensity, because she does not have to fit her writing around children or family life. In the year or two after her Booker win she felt a sense of pressure, but over time \u201cthat self-consciousness fell\u00a0away\u201d, she says, \u201cand I was just living in a very isolated way and working\u201d. She phones her mother daily and visits her\u00a0often in upstate New York, and she would see friends\u00a0a few times a week. But mostly, for decades, she wrote alone at home in New York or on long trips to\u00a0Mexico.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere have been times in my life when I have been very, very solitary,\u201d she says. So solitary that her social identity appeared to dissolve. \u201cI didn\u2019t think of myself as a person, particularly. I didn\u2019t think of myself as being from somewhere. I didn\u2019t think of myself as a woman, particularly, because I was so alone and what does it mean, without context?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018It\u2019s ordinary life now\u2019 \u2026 Kiran Desai. Photograph: Benedict Evans<\/p>\n

We meet at her home on a quiet street in Queens, where she migrates daily from her kitchen table to an upstairs desk to catch the best light. Copies of the UK editions of her book have recently been delivered and remain in a box at her front door. Even now, she finds\u00a0herself thinking: \u201cI really could have done it this way, if I had just taken that out and put it somewhere\u00a0else \u2026 \u201d<\/p>\n

Desai was 35 when she won the Booker \u2013 making her, at the time, the youngest woman to win \u2013 and now she is 54. She is slim, elegantly dressed in a pale pink linen tunic and dark pink trousers, a grey stripe running through her hair, and has a gentle, precise manner of speaking. To finish the book felt \u201canticlimactic\u201d, she says, \u201cbecause it\u2019s ordinary life now, after living in a completely artistic world\u201d. She doesn\u2019t quite know what to do with herself.<\/p>\n

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, like her previous novel, is an epic, multistranded, sometimes darkly humorous family saga that takes on big political and philosophical themes. Sonia and Sunny are both Indian writers who moved to the US as students and whose paths first cross when Sonia\u2019s family send Sunny a marriage proposal. The proposal goes nowhere, because Sunny is dating an American woman and has no interest in old-fashioned customs. Sonia herself is in thrall to Ilan de Toorjen Foss, a needy, abusive, much older artist.<\/p>\n

Desai celebrates winning the Booker prize in 2006. Photograph: John D Mchugh\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Many of the \u201cloving\u201d relationships in this novel, whether romantic or familial, are destructive, uneven, constrictive. The characters turn to art as a salve and means of escape from their difficult or disappointing lives, but art is also another source of exploitation. Ilan is a thief and a parasite, who profits from the suffering of others. He, in turn, gives himself entirely over to his art. \u201cIf you are a good artist \u2026 you give more of your life to art, you begin to subtract your life so it becomes such an emptiness that you dare not look upon it,\u201d he\u00a0tells Sonia. Does Desai ever feel that way about herself? \u201cI do feel that I made that exchange,\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t regret it but \u2026 it did displace my life. Or maybe I just filled it up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Desai says she has always \u201clived in her head\u201d, but growing up in Delhi, the youngest of four siblings, she was never alone. Her father worked for an oil company, and her mother was expected to support him, which meant putting on a beautiful silk sari every evening and either hosting or attending a party. Desai speaks with admiration of her mother\u2019s resourcefulness, how she nonetheless found the time and confidence to\u00a0write, and managed to fill the family bookshelves with\u00a0hard\u2011to-find books. Anita Desai<\/a> was nominated for the Booker three times, but the children understood her fame \u201csort of backwards\u201d, only when their mother\u2019s glamorous foreign-language translators began coming\u00a0to stay. \u201cIt opened up the door to the world and\u00a0eventually she stepped through it and left, and\u00a0took\u00a0me\u00a0with her,\u201d Desai says. When she was a teenager, her mother was offered a fellowship at Cambridge and\u00a0Desai, the only child still at home, went to the UK\u00a0with\u00a0her.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was scary to me, because I had never left India,\u201d Desai recalls. She found it \u201cstartling\u201d to witness the vast power divide between the two nations, something for which her voracious reading of British children\u2019s classics did not prepare her. \u201cI could not put it together with Paddington Bear and The Wind in the Willows and all kinds of other books I read early on that were so strange,\u201d she says. In the end, the book that best helped\u00a0her understand her immigrant experience was VS\u00a0Naipaul\u2019s The Enigma of Arrival<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When fear enters a nation it\u2019s almost the end of it<\/p>\n

A year after moving to Cambridge, she and her mother emigrated to Amherst, Massachusetts, and Desai enrolled in a US high school. \u201cI have to say that in comparison to India the American system of education seemed so unbelievably easy, you just got smiley faces and encouragement,\u201d she jokes.<\/p>\n

She went on to Bennington, a liberal arts college in\u00a0Vermont, where she took her first creative writing class. \u201cI remember just being so happy, the first story I wrote,\u201d she says. It was called Hair Oil, about a man obsessed with his hair; the next was about a snooty civil servant sent to rural India. \u201cVery odd,\u201d she says, laughing. \u201cI\u00a0don\u2019t know why I was writing those stories.\u201d She also began working on her first book, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard<\/a>, which was published in 1998, a\u00a0satire\u00a0about a young man who goes to live\u00a0in\u00a0a\u00a0guava tree and is mistaken for a holy man.<\/p>\n

Shortly after, Desai completed an MFA at Columbia University in New York. She found that one downside to studying creative writing is that when your work\u00a0is\u00a0regularly read by a group it \u201cmakes you very, very self-conscious \u2013 and you need to lose that to be able to write well\u201d. Afterwards she did not join writers\u2019 groups and she wrote The Inheritance of Loss the \u201cold-fashioned way\u201d, alone, over seven years. Her mother is always her first reader, because she understands instinctively what her daughter is trying to achieve. \u201cShe knows the landscape I\u2019m working from, so she understands what I am trying to do, even though it\u2019s not yet on the page,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

In Desai\u2019s new novel, Sonia is working on a story that sounds very similar to Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, and she shows it to Ilan, who tells her to stop writing \u201corientalist nonsense\u201d and to keep away from magical realism or subjects such as arranged marriages. \u201cHe\u2019s uttering something that a lot of people say, and is a legitimate thing to say,\u201d Desai explains. Like Sonia, she has grappled with the question of how India should be represented to a western readership, and she ultimately includes several arranged marriage plots and an element of magical realism in the novel.<\/p>\n

As Sonia learns, there are no simple answers. In the\u00a0novel, Sonia changes one of her stories so that the character eats an apple rather than a guava, rendering it less \u201cexotic\u201d to western readers but also less true, because apples are more expensive and less plentiful in India. \u201cMost marriages in India are arranged, that is the truth of the matter. But should you not write about it because of the audience it\u2019s going to be sold to? I think a lot of it comes down to: are you a good or a bad writer?\u201d<\/p>\n

Desai has been a New Yorker for more than 25 years, but until her father\u2019s death in 2008 she visited India every year. Now that the family home has been sold (her parents were separated after she and her mother moved to the US), she visits less frequently, and she felt this novel might be her last chance to write about India. She wanted to take a snapshot of the country around the turn of the millennium, when Hindu nationalism began rising and dinner party conversations shifted in ways that alarmed Desai. \u201cYou would be in the living room with friends and suddenly something else was acceptable,\u201d she remembers. When she visited India last winter, she was struck by the fear expressed by friends from religious minorities. \u201cI did learn the lesson that when fear enters a nation that\u2019s almost the end of it. And I never thought it would happen in the United States as well,\u201d she says, but now she sees similar fear in her multicultural neighbourhood of Jackson Heights. \u201cUnderneath the subway tracks, before Trump was elected, it was very lively. People were selling arepas and tacos and skewers of food and religious charms and breads, and actually a lot of women soliciting prostitution,\u201d she says. But now many of these enterprises have been shut down. \u201cPeople are very scared,\u201d she says, because of immigration raids.<\/p>\n

\u2018My mother knows the landscape I\u2019m working from \u2013 she understands what I am trying to do\u2019 \u2026 Desai with her mother, Anita Desai. Photograph: Graziano Arici\/eyevine<\/p>\n

Desai loves living in this diverse community, and at a healthy remove from the New York literary scene. She lives next to families from Ireland and Tibet, and until his recent death she used to often visit her nonagenarian Egyptian neighbour to drink coffee under his fig tree and hear stories of his upbringing in Alexandria \u2013 \u201cso I wasn\u2019t entirely solitary\u201d, she concedes. We take a walk along a row of South American restaurants and grocery stores and phone shops and money exchanges until suddenly she stops and says, delighted: \u201cCan you smell that? Curry!\u201d Within one block, the culture of the street has shifted, completely, from South America to the\u00a0Indian subcontinent. She points out the best kebab\u00a0shops and we stop to admire the opulent, gem-encrusted, 24-carat gold wedding jewellery. A man hands us each a business card promoting a \u201cWorld Famous Indian Astrologer\u201d and Desai notices, amused, that as well as reuniting lovers and securing promotions, this man purports to solve the ambiguous \u201ckids mistake\u201d (sic). She shows me the tucked-away Tibetan dumpling shop that Sunny visits in the book, and the bank he frequents.<\/p>\n

At 4.30pm, her mother phones, as is their tradition. Anita Desai is 88 and has had a few falls recently, and\u00a0Desai, who of the four siblings lives closest and is\u00a0her first port of call, was very worried about leaving her mother to go on book tours. She had inadvertently added to her anxiety by reading several books set in old people\u2019s homes, including Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont<\/a> by Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth Strout\u2019s Olive, Again<\/a> \u2013 the latter passed to her by her mother, who said: \u201cYou should read this, it\u2019s terrifying!\u201d Despite\u00a0this, her mother, who is \u201cthrilled\u201d Desai\u2019s novel\u00a0is finished, has been urging her not to hold back on any travel plans.<\/p>\n

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny has already been longlisted for the Booker prize<\/a>, which Desai says feels like remarkable recognition. \u201cI feel relieved, as if I have averted some nebulous disaster, and very lucky,\u201d she says. She is not yet ready or able to start a new project but already knows that whatever comes next for her, it cannot be quite as ambitious in scope. \u201cI could never do it again, it would not be strategically smart,\u201d she says. \u201cThis feels like the big book of my life in that way. I don\u2019t have time to do it again.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai will be published by Hamish Hamilton on 25 September. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not long after the novelist Kiran Desai published her second book, The Inheritance of Loss, which won the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33022,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-33021","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}