I enjoy reading your take on this novel, Henry. I just finished it a week or two ago, and it's one of my favorite books I've read this year.
Regarding her style, I think the use of language in the initial two paragraphs you quoted is actually wonderful in ways that I can't entirely articulate except to say the use of vocabulary, the use of punctuation to create syntactic effect, and the details to give a sense of the place—I think they are fantastic. So coming into this novel with no sense of Kiran Desai as a writer, I would say she very much writes with a style that appeals to me at the sentence level, in addition to everything else (humor, misfortune, storytelling, pacing, sense of place, critiques/insights into American culture, etc.).
P.S. I also want to say that having walked and walked and walked all over New York City, her depiction of this city is spot on.
Terrific piece that explains why The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is so captivating and also why so many current novels feel so empty. This book was definitely not “work-shopped” by the “lapidarians” and it is better for it.
I have a sense that diaspora is a permanent condition of literature now because it is a condition of so much of the world, and Naipaul was one of the first novelists of this condition in his early Trinidad novels and beyond. Ever searching, questioning, questing. The enigma of arrival, where he arrives at a place he becomes intertwined with, the seasons and life and landscape and people, at last, a home, and yet....
I enjoy reading your take on this novel, Henry. I just finished it a week or two ago, and it's one of my favorite books I've read this year.
Regarding her style, I think the use of language in the initial two paragraphs you quoted is actually wonderful in ways that I can't entirely articulate except to say the use of vocabulary, the use of punctuation to create syntactic effect, and the details to give a sense of the place—I think they are fantastic. So coming into this novel with no sense of Kiran Desai as a writer, I would say she very much writes with a style that appeals to me at the sentence level, in addition to everything else (humor, misfortune, storytelling, pacing, sense of place, critiques/insights into American culture, etc.).
P.S. I also want to say that having walked and walked and walked all over New York City, her depiction of this city is spot on.
Terrific piece that explains why The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is so captivating and also why so many current novels feel so empty. This book was definitely not “work-shopped” by the “lapidarians” and it is better for it.
a pleasure to read this review, Henry
Naipaul references are fascinating.
I have a sense that diaspora is a permanent condition of literature now because it is a condition of so much of the world, and Naipaul was one of the first novelists of this condition in his early Trinidad novels and beyond. Ever searching, questioning, questing. The enigma of arrival, where he arrives at a place he becomes intertwined with, the seasons and life and landscape and people, at last, a home, and yet....
Beautiful review. Deepens my appreciation of the book. I have changed my own writing over the years to make it concise, this post made me rethink.
When I started reading Desais books I found myself editing the sentences but with Sunny and Sonia I was happy to go along with her imagination.