Kiran Desai ‘unit Sonia and Sunni’: Review

Long novels require respect. When entering a library and choosing a 600 -page literary novel, many readers will calculate an instinctive: This should be dangerous. No an author will pour a lot of ink without being necessary to say. The reader’s expectations may rise more if the writer, for example, is one of the tight celebrities who has not published a 19 -year book – and is still higher if that famous novelist writes about writing, and claims her demand in the form of the novel itself.

In this case, the writer is Kiran Desai, the novel is Unit Sonia and Ambassador, The number of pages is 688. Bokerer Longlists, it is a follow -up to Desai’s Superhit 2006 Loss inheritance. It is a great swing. He was mainly appointed in India and the United States between 1996 and 2002, and he told him in a third person who is entitled to the Russian novel in the nineteenth century, as it combines the traditions of different realism: it is part of the marriage conspiracy, a partial shock conspiracy, and part of the ethics novel. The most ambitious, it is a book concerned with the Indian identity that benefits from metacommentary on the act of writing about identity. Desai’s heroes – whispers, correspondents, Sonia, ambitious novelist – are isolated international writers. By choosing as the heroes of two people who write about a feeling of loneliness and identity-permanent topics in immigrant imagination-Desai aims to make the destroyed terrain well.

The conspiracy of marriage is the backbone of the novel and is largely successful. The love story is a supported marriage story, which is called Sonia’s first friend, Klushihat in Indian imagination. However, Desai offers an evolution: the novel is opened with the families of heroes who are trying to reconcile you; However, the initial proposal fails because Sunny has a secret white friend. Later, Sonia W and Nani met their own terms. The Desai MultPart Cute meeting offers elegantly challenge in the old world-the new world. The conspiracy of her marriage revolves around the complex roads that affect migration on the intimate relationship and how romance is political. Sonia, who studied in the United States but cannot obtain a visa to return, feels like a burden on Sunny, who guards his green card with jealousy. “She was giving a sunny a lot of bad news, like one of the relatives of the third world, whose only choice is to get rid of their problems to disrupt their problems the life of the first world,” Desai writes. When the couple travel to Italy and Sunny, they cannot stop talking about refugees, they suffer from a rare battle. Sonia Sunny told his dissatisfaction that she wanted to enjoy her journey to the first world without concern about the “other third world”. Here, Desi is intelligently restored the nineteenth -century marriage plot as a story of the twenty -first century of global identity.

However, romance competes with the shock story. Early, Sonia is in an abusive relationship with an old painter, Ilan – a romantic dynamic recognized by Desai as “a boring stereotype of the older male artist, monster and younger artists,”. Desai tries to write this stereotype by presenting a surreal plot: Sonia literally losing her creative powers to Ilan when she steals her family’s legacy, a protective amulet. Then, when she and Sunny meet together, they are chased by “ghost hunting”, a manifestation of Sonia shock. Such a highly concept craftsmanship of shock, in 2025, revolves around cliches like the stereotype that you are trying to represent.

In the case of ethics novel, Desai’s Metanarration is presented as a text between the category Anna Karenina, What is read by the young young Sonia. Desai has Tolstoyan talent for both sympathy for the upper layers and the spread of the interior. Sonia, sunny, their relatives – people who can withstand a leave in Europe, although only after being interrogated to obtain a visa – they are case studies in an unequal concession. When Disai is written in these complications, she triumphs. Sunny, for example, feels a solidarity with his Quinn’s immigrant neighbors while he was suppressing the fact that his family funded his education with black money. Desai shines in particular when the mother of Sunni, Babita, is a small widow who raised her son to migrate after he hates her to leave her in India; She destroys her journey to London through a shameful scene from Disi to clean a toilet, and she is seeking an exhibition around the Marajas (impressive Indian type) to amplify her feelings. Through Babita, Desai puts many convincing observations about the international Indians: “This pursuit of escaping from India felt patriotism,” she wrote. “If you are an Indian, you have become American.”

Details of the materials are a specialization of Disai. Her outlook embodies everything from Toupee Bobby-Pinsed-Pinsed to a bag of potatoes floating. Sometimes, though, Desai goes too far, and makes these “millions of notes” for purple prose. Corta “woven in the red peel of coconut, khaki under Banan, and purple of sea monsters drawn from the depths of the tidal tidal and throws the beach.” The sentences become more powerful as the book approaches its end, and it is a sure sign that it strives under the weight of its many competing elements.

The cause of stress may be in the least persuading preoccupation in the novel: uniform immigration and the difficulty of expressing the identity of the individual in a world that erases the Indians. Since these topics constitute the frame that combines everything together, Desai must achieve the maximum benefit from them in order to take over the novel. This task requires her to determine the concepts of unity and identity to say something surprising and surprising. This is difficult, partly because feeling lonely is a familiar topic in the American Indian novel in the twenty -first century (blame Jhumpa Lahiri and its literary heirs). Of course, with specific social worlds, the development of a deep personality, and the conspiracies that convert ideas into narration, novelists can always find a new reef on old themes. In fact, with its well -imagined side characters, it makes the unit of unit: the feeling of loneliness in Babita leads to a bloody crime line (albeit rushed), while the unity of a Sunni Satia’s friend sends him in a calm endeavor to an Indian bride.

However, many heroic plans do not make concepts at stake Sonia and Apostle. Desai’s attempts to link Sonia and Sunni’s love story with its broader topics leading to indulging in clichés. When they meet, they are opened immediately because they were alone Indian in the West and because both of them flee with the relations with the distinctive, shallow racists who wander around the curry. In an attempt to capture the comfort of being with an Indian colleague, the basic Desai Platituds uses: Sonia Sunny and herself are bound to a “very deep culture” with her “eternal water”; Sunny also reflects Sonia, that “dusk in India always felt stable and old, a civilization that has become full.” These descriptions are written in an unwritten manner of migrant nostalgia, whom the migrant imagination readers will face several times before – two people who are country and culture, which facilitates imagination and facilitate the eagerness to it. A 2025 novel on the identity of the immigrants, especially those that aim to say something about the representation of immigrant identity, condemned its readers a little more.

It is unfortunate that metacommentary is in Sonia and Ambassador He is very Inchoate, because, as an author and a general personality, Desai is in a good position to sort through the ruins of our representative speech often (and clarify its broader social consequences). In addition to being a respected Indian novelist itself, Desai is a hereditary of the post -colonial novel as a daughter of three times in the Bolkur Disai menu. It is also not strange to allergies and the risk of India’s representation of a Western audience. While many international readers celebrated Loss inheritance, The novel incited a controversy on the Indian subcontinent to represent Nepalis; There were threats to burn books in Kalimpong. However, reflections in the articles are in Sonia and Ambassador Read more like post -colonial arms than the main writer who puts a muscle claim to the novel as a form.

Did Disai want to explore these political social issues deeply through the lives of their citizens, because their imaginary secondary characters are waiting for the wings? In addition to Babita and Satya, there is a aunt Sonia Mina Foi, a woman with Hindus fortified in Christianity. Disai may also share more clearly with politics. Sonia and Ambassador It occurs between two historical moments of anti -Muslims violence: the 1992 mosque in Audia and the 2002 riots in Googa. The Hindu majority behind a lot of this violence also calls for the idea that the nation -state has a spirit. It was amazing to see Desai exerting more effort to compare the Sony and Sunni desire of “legitimate”, perhaps to capture the truth of India with the logic of conservative movements that lie on the edges of the novel.

It is experienced only long novels for the tremendous work that enters into its formulation. Sometimes long novels are more enjoyable to their glorious chaos, assuming that they add up to something new. But upon reaching page 688, it is disappointing to feel, despite the many Desai’s talents, that Sonia and Ambassador It ends near the place where he started.