by Kiran Desai, 2025
This book was recommended in either the New York Times or the Denver Post. It’s a novel about two young Indian adults living in the United States, away from their childhood home and culture. The character of Sonia, a beautiful Indian young lady is front and center. Her family in India, grandparents, spinster Aunt, mama and papa, are drawn out so intricately, each one of them. I realize that Adam’s grandma, Nguyen Thi Tram (Vietnamese), being called Ba came from Manu’s Papa’s Indian side. Ba is the name Sonia’s grandma is called.
Taking this book to Alaska with me to finish.
Here are some of the beautiful sentences:
page 6, Sonia is talking with her grandparents long distance and she is crying because she is so lonely. “Sonia tried to explain. “I’ve ballooned in my own head. I cannot stop thinking about myself and my problems. I’m dreading the winter. In the dark and cold, it will get worse—“”
Page 81, Sunny is leaving his apartment after a fight with his girlfriend, Ulla, (white American):
“At nine P.M., Sunny fled for the subway wishing he were as uncoupled as the purple wind that blew through the city. Even in this country, where he’d assumed love was different from the Indian version, it was not a private endeavor, but all about being a public event. If you didn’t stamp and stamp love with legitimacy and acknowledgment, and stamp it some more, silver and gold, with further legalities and recognitions, the ghost of future lost love infiltrated and your love became irrevocably unformed, the lack folded into its substance.”
Page 90: “Sunny shipped his Basque wine. Secretly he was thinking that this woman had some nerve to go from her New York City apartment – no doubt equipped with a stove, microwave, toaster, fridge, blender, coffeemaker, hair dryer, vacuum cleaner, television, computer, music system, heater, fan, air conditioner, boiler, furnace, if not also a bicycle or car – to tell women in India to cook their rice in a cardboard box covered with silver reflective paper so as to prevent deforestation and climate change.”
Page 127: “Papa considered Sonia so precious that he did not cheat on Mama because that in turn would harm Sonia. Although this may not really be the reason her father was not a cheat. Perhaps he simply couldn’t loosen his death grip upon her mother, but that is how it made Sonia feel. Because when someone betrays their spouse, they also betray their daughter and the small life of the house: the trustful dog, the cat with the attitude of a movie star, the houseplant venturing a new leaf, the leftover vegetable soup, the worn socks, the sliver of soap stuck upon the new bar of soap. They betray all these creatures and all these objects that have no idea they’ve been made into a joke, that their lives are actually something other than what they understand them to be. In the end, the betrayer can only scorn such naivete.”
Page 132: “Art is how you climb out of the abyss after you’ve made yourselves into beasts. You have to hook on and rebuild yourself from outside in. This is why it is essential to live in a civilization offering theaters, opera houses, philharmonics, film festivals, cafes, and parks with magazine kiosks and benches upon which to read a newspaper. A city where you can go to a museum of a country that no longer exists, or a lecture on the vibrant culture of tenements, or the 92nd Street Y to hear a great pianist who is still miraculously alive, with a repertoire of expressions of anguished intensity, or a film about an Iranian road worker having an existential crisis. It is important to live where you can turn on public radio and listen to a quick roundup of crimes of war around the world followed by an hour-long conversation with an Irish poet about the consequence of his faith upon his meter. This reassigns you to the calm and rational side of things.”