Six hundred seventy pages of wonderful

The thing is 670 pages. Okay, it was a 2025 Man Booker Prize finalist, but do I want to spend three weeks of my reading time on two young people "whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years"? Do you? After all, the world is filled with shorter novels waiting to be read. Nevertheless, I gave it 50 pages to see how it goes.

Three weeks and 670 pages later I closed The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai in awe of her talent and thankful I'd decided to read this, her third novel. (Her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss. won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award.)

It would be nice to offer a unique, penetrating, adequate comment but I cannot improve on the words of others. Author Andrew Sean Greer wrote, "[It] achieves the ultimate of what a book should do: carry us away into other peoples’ lives, thinking as they think, feeling as they feel, until it comes around and shows us to ourselves. Grand, magnificent, intimate, more than wonderful, this is a novel you will hold close to your heart. I certainly did. I cannot recommend it enough,” 

And author Lauren Groff wrote, "Literary love stories are vanishingly rare these days, and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is that even more precious thing: a love story that's also profound, sparkling, funny, exquisitely written, and that teaches us how to love in full-throated exultation for the astonishments of this world."

The novel needs all those pages to hold all the characters: Sonia's parents, Sunny's mother, their servants (including the cook the mothers compete for), relatives, eavesdroppers Sonia's lover, Sunny's lover, Sunny's best friend. Yet even with all the characters and the unfamiliar Indian names and Indian dishes, one should have no difficulty knowing who was who and the food is clearly food.

We watch daily life in upper class Indian life, Indian customs and cuisine, and more and more. The action takes takes us Vermont, New York City, Delhi, Allahabad, Goa (what do you know about life in Goa?), Venice, Mexico. 

And in addition to conjuring up a wealth (a plethora?) of characters, Desai puts them in a recognizable historical reality. The older characters remember Partition; we watch the contemporary ones experience anti-Muslim pogroms and 9/11.

Desai is also able to weave in interesting, apt observation, almost philosophical tidbits that illustrate a character or a situation. Here for example are Sonia's thoughts about death: "It was worth believing in an impossible story of God, so when death occurred and the impossible happened, you already believed that anything could be true, and if you believed in heaven, you would be much less sad. So many reason to be religious."

I hope that by writing about the length of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny I have not discouraged potential readers. Yes, it's long. Yes, it's about Indians. Yes, it requires a commitment. And yes, it is an exceptional book.