Not so much a novel as a marvel ... Here is sweet validation of the idea that to create something truly transcendent — a work of art depicting love, family, nature and culture in all their fullness — might take time ... Where to begin analyzing these close-to-700 pages, not one extraneous or boring? ... One of the many miracles of Desai’s writing is the attention she gives to secondary and even minor characters ... Among those most rarefied books: better company than real-life people. Feel the tingle.
Desai is masterful at excavating the layers of motivation beneath action, demonstrating how things are often not as they seem, how the forces of history repeat, oceanic and inescapable, affecting individuals in ways that evade their own awareness ... The narrative is punctuated with nuanced, frequently devastating insights into the knottiness of race and representation, the legacy of orientalism, and the complexities of interracial and intercultural relationships ... This novel floats upon itself, a gazing eye, a voice, a thought, a magnificent vision.
An epic romance ... Isn’t a gripping novel. That’s not a criticism — it’s just that Desai often writes as if she doesn’t care whether or not the reader is hooked. The story unfolds without any obvious rhythm. Narrative momentum is dissipated by swapping point of view ... It’s a grown-up novel that doesn’t hold the reader’s hand. Its undeniable power and heft is an effect of accumulated time spent in the company of Desai’s characters: the more you give, the more you’ll get.
Desai intelligently recasts the 19th-century marriage plot as a 21st-century story of global identity. The romance, however, competes with the tale of trauma ... The sentences get sloppier as the book nears its conclusion, a sure sign it is straining under the weight of its many competing elements ... The protagonists’ many plotlines...do not advance the concepts at stake ... It is tempting to admire long novels solely for the sheer labor that goes into crafting them. And long novels are sometimes even more pleasurable for their glorious mess, assuming they add up to something fresh. But upon reaching page 688, it is disappointing to feel, despite Desai’s many talents, that Sonia and Sunny is ending very close to where it began.
Desai's characters inhabit a complex post-modern, post-colonial world and, yet, her own sensibility as a novelist is playfully old-fashioned ... Desai has come close to achieving [the] ideal. This is a spectacular novel...to savor, ruminate over, and, yes, even reread.
The writing moves fluently between distinctive voices, fusing a minutely observed realism with a swirling undercurrent of magical thinking. It demands patient engagement and offers generous rewards in return ... Despite its daunting size, her new book has a lighter touch than that of its predecessor ... Desai is constantly pushing her readers away from certainties of interpretation ... The narrative is resolutely down-to-earth, and among the pleasures of Desai’s writing is its sharp focus on what the characters are eating, what they are wearing ... Would this sprawling novel have worked at shorter length? Perhaps. But its scale, large enough to accommodate proliferating connections between characters and cultures, is a necessary part of Desai’s purpose.
A triumph ... Desai has a Dickensian love for the ever so slightly larger than life, for characters who are simultaneously familiar types and distinct individuals. Always eloquent but rarely concise, she revels in detail for its own sake; the novel abounds in humorous asides and glories in tossed-off details, and wry observations ... Kiran Desai approaches Sonia’s impossible ideal; the novel is a glorious profusion of character and color, insight and provocation. Lavish, funny, smart, and wise, this is a novel that will last.
Capacious and shape-shifting though the novel is, filled with subtexts and shadow narratives, it is still a challenge to hold the contradictions and demands of multiple identities ... Both dizzyingly vast and insistently miniature ... She pulls it off, not only in her manoeuvring of cast and incident, but in her ability to elicit apprehension, laughter, compassion and curiosity in the reader.
A novel of stunning scope and ambition ... Both expansive and intimate ... In less skilled hands, this convergence and symmetry might feel schematic, but Desai’s great gift is texture. Her writing gives even minor characters a sense of history and gravity. Her people never feel invented; they seem observed ... Her prose is luxurious and sensual ... The remarkable and refreshing thing about this novel is how insistently hopeful it remains ... A novel of tremendous scope and emotional richness: absorbing, poignant, frequently funny and, above all, deeply humane.
Well worth the wait. Its sprawling nearly-700 pages are packed with the best that contemporary fiction has to offer ... Readers...can expect a funny and moving exploration of the forces that conspire to keep these characters alone — and what it might take for them to find each other.
Bold, meandering, and frequently melodramatic, Sonia and Sunny is certainly unique, but does not always deliver on consistency ... While the titular characters are nuanced and well thought out, the serial-like mannerisms of the supporting cast is at times painful to read ... As a whole, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a monumental feat and stands apart as a work on its own and from the other inclusions on this year’s Booker longlist, a relatively sparse baker’s dozen with several novels clocking at under 200 pages. Sonia and Sunny hearkens back to an earlier time, engaging in somewhat dated prose excess, to fascinating results.
