Proof positive that I have fallen in love with a book: coffee stains on the pages. Rather than sticking to my routine of reading in the evening, a book that truly grabs me is exposed to the arthritic clumsiness of early mornings, coffee cup in hand – or dropped, as the case may be.

It does not happen a lot these days – utter fascination, that is, not the spilling – but The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a recent novel by Kiran Desai, managed to join the collection of mocha-tinged book spines in this household.

(The rest of today’s images are graffiti from NYC where part of the book unfolds – Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Flatbush I photographed across the years, some Miami thrown in. They are almost all of the kind that relate to the novel – ghost hounds, snakes, a variety of other critters. Eyes, (un)reflecting, play a role, as does swimming. Best I could come up with, given that I have never set foot into India, alas.)

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The novel was short listed for this year’s Booker Prize. I bet the bank Desai would have won if not for her earlier Booker Prize in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss. Instead, David Szalay was picked for his novel “Flesh,” its sparse language and focus on masculinity the exact opposite of the opulent, image-rich prose of Desai with her attention to the myriad external and internal factors constraining women’s existence.

In some ways, the Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is an old-fashioned epic and a tentative love story – I grew up on those kinds of books, still infatuated by them, mourning the loss of novels that forced a 670 + page attention span, familiarity with multitudes of characters across generations, eras and geography, and protagonists who are allowed to progress linearly through the plot, while fighting to overcome various obstacles, with success, author willing.

And is she ever – Desai has an enviable generosity of spirit regarding most characters in play, allowing for many happy endings, no matter how deus-ex-machina they appear, from exploited household staff escaping with the help of micro-loans, to the main villain, a famous artist who is granted a disappearance into oblivion instead of a just punishment for his cruel narcissistic exploitation of the lives and souls of others. (Then again, maybe oblivion is the worst fate imaginable for a pathological narcissist.)

Both he and the titular male protagonist, a drifting, aspiring journalist who left a family of financial black market criminals behind in India for a job in New York, are set up as opposites to the choices one can make when trying to find a self outside the reach of overbearing, dominating mothers and societies that measure you by wild success only. Let’s add a third male, Sonia’s father, who is both an unbearable husband and a loving dad, pointing to the fact that things are never just black & white. Which also applies to various minor male characters, mixing it up between betrayers and supporters, exploiters and helpers, gawkers and touchers, liars and those who fess up to the truth. Come to think of it, all characters, really, independent of gender. No one is beyond reproach, most are in some ways admirable or can be, at least, understood – a blueprint of life that resonates for its verisimilitude.

Let’s turn to the women who for me carried this extraordinarily inventive story, spanning decades across continents, with central locations in India, particularly Goa, North America and Mexico. As so often in novels about loneliness, external settings that differ from the origins of the protagonists help to increase a sense of alienation: where do you belong?

This is doubly the case if the displacement is filtered through the prism of racial, gender and religious hierarchies, with brown people landing among white ones, Muslims among Hindus or Christians. However, the author cleverly introduces one of the initially most lonely people of the entire cast upfront, stuck with her Indian family of origin, returned after a failed marriage. Without means or profession of her own, the existential need for support is a suffocating corset that she can only unfasten after the death of her parents, an escape provided by a stroke of luck – a spot opens in a nearby convent, where she ultimately thrives. Should this all be about freedom to choose your life, rather than loneliness when ripped out of the context you grew up in?

Sonia, a young Indian woman and talented writer, gets her education in an American college, escapes her bone-deep loneliness there by falling in love with a much older artist, seemingly sleep-walks through life and an increasingly abusive relationship, until she breaks and returns home to India. There is a sense of passivity, helplessness, hollowness that in turn dismays and saddens the reader familiar with her kind of malaise; her family tries to arrange a marriage with the son of acquaintances, the proverbial Sunny who is anything but, but that falls through.

Sonia’s mother has long left the picture – she is able to escape her oppressive marriage to a mountain retreat, (inheritance of rent-producing property making it possible – precarity due to lack of funds a repeated theme overall) and only hesitantly tolerates a visiting depressed daughter who threatens to disturb her new-found solitude. The grandfather was a German artist whose own journey of self discovery went West to East ultimately ending in disintegration, the reverse of that of the younger generation, geographically and psychologically, both.

(An aside: German has only one word for both loneliness and solitude – Einsamkeit. if you want to refer to solitude, you have to add something like “self chosen” to loneliness. That implication of some kind of agency is still not enough to soften the negative associations with loneliness – while the English term solitude really radiates something positive – or so says this writer who thrives on solitude quite often. And speaking of German: the novel has been translated by Robin Detje, to be published next spring. I have recommended their remarkable blog here before for my German readers – do check it out.)

Sonia and Sunny meet by chance back on the subcontinent and fall for each other during various trips to Goa and later Venice, but are so riddled by doubts, neediness, trauma and passivity that they are unable to make it work. An episode of almost drowning while swimming in the ocean, hones in on the fact that they have to save themselves first, before rescuing the other. (Water and swimming play a central, symbolic role throughout the novel, with the ocean’s freeing, sometimes therapeutic, often treacherous connotations.) In fact, the lovers have to establish their own true sense of self to begin with, something they seem incapable of doing.

For ⅔ of the book we travel with them through their interior landscapes while they are dealing with family or professional issues, in a quasi somnambulistic state. You roll your eyes? Don’t know what you’re missing. Personified, this provides a mirror of our times with pandemic-induced isolation, languor, the increasing absence of collective settings, from religion to unions that might provide embeddednes, really the absence of institutional, social or cultural safety-nets that stretch under you. We are reminded that no matter how much these very constraints affect individuals’ choices, they clearly provide something of value, only to be realized when they are no longer available.

The last third of the book picks up the tempo, and opens the toolkit of the writer, so far sparingly applied, now in full force. For the first time, real-world, political events are introduced with barely hinted implication for the tenuous co-existence between Indian and Pakistani Muslim and Hindu populations. (For me this was an interesting contrast to Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh, whose novel about lonely Indian expats, and family relations between East and West, are completely defined by historical events of world war and the Partition.)

In any case, our current two protagonists are finally turning towards action. Sunny does something truly meaningful for Sonia and seeks her out again. Sonia commits to her own strengths, leading to a delightful plot twist, and a new willingness to take risks. As does the author: she adds a variety of tropes that were sparsely used before, introducing a hefty dose of magic realism. Here is a favorite paragraph that encapsulates everything I believe to be true about good fiction writing in general and this novel in particular:

“The fantastical felt right because it was only by fantasy that most people overcame their reality. If she continued to write multiple narratives until the truth of something she wrote became apparent – whatever those narratives might be labeled by others: surrealist, realist, orientalist, occidentalist, fable, legend, nightmare, daydream, myth, satire, kitsch, tragedy, comedy – wouldn’t every story become the equivalent to every other story? If the center did not hold, maybe it should not hold. Maybe if reality shifted shape, a writer should let it shift.” (p. 654.)

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I think reality has shifted shape, for us readers in 2025. When I try to recall the loneliest people I remember reading about when I was younger, their alienation seems to have had a different quality.

Start with poor, poor, lonely Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Love interests thwarted, class barriers insurmountable, religion a slow poison, societal condemnation of living outside the norms leading to murder, mayhem and death. But he knows who he is, what he wants, and the entire novel explores the dramatic consequences of society’s refusal to question the proscriptions of lives appropriately lived, lest that would disturb established hierarchies and patterns of power.

Or take Rainer Maria Rilke”s “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge”, a semi-autobiographical novel narrated by a young man from Denmark visiting Paris. He is deeply lonely, writing to his wife, trying to understand a world full of death and disease, wondering about his place in it, but he has a solid sense of self in juxtaposition to what surrounds him and even draws artistic power from it.

Then there is the guy in the basement, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s unnamed narrator in Notes from the Underground who decided to retreat into a world of isolation. His solitude is agentic, he feels himself in his resentment and rejection, his stubborn hate for a world that denies him what he believes to be entitled to.

Swap loneliness in a cellar for isolation in a summer house in the boonies, and you have 17 year-old Edgar Wibeau in Ulrich Plenzensdorf’s retelling of the Goethe classic, The New Sorrows of Young W., set in the 1970s in East Germany. No matter how lonely, he knows who and what he is, with a sense of superiority only teenagers can pull off successfully, outraged at a society that denies him approval of his assumed specialness. Doesn’t end well, either.

My final pick, one of the loneliest women in the literature I know, is Franziska Linkerhand, protagonist of a novel by Brigitte Reimann set in East Germany between 1945 and the 1960s, a period of reconstruction and political and cultural upheaval. (Alas, still not translated into English even though the full, un-censored version has been around since the mid 1990s.) She is a complicated person, not a nice one, necessarily, but full of progressive aspirations as a young architect, extremely bright and brimming with an unfathomable longing for an unreachable lover. The clash between her desires and the restrictions built into the political system of the young GDR doesn’t make things easier. That book shaped me through multiple readings in my 20ies, just because there was such a sense of determination, a will to fight, a singularity set up against larger forces, a permission to capitulate if it became a fight against wind mills. Wanting a better, more just world defined the protagonist, her sense of self, loneliness be damned. She, like the others mentioned, knew who they were, but raged against the constraints imposed on them.

Reality shifting shape: Desai is onto something when she leads us to think about the obsession with identity in our current world. All choices seem to be on the table, and everything and everyone is or can be seemingly connected. The implied stress to develop and live up to one’s individuality, without the ability to shed the restrictions imposed by guardrails for more collective societies, throws people into unsolvable dilemmas. Never mind the barriers put up by individualistic Western societies who are unable to eradicate racism as a source of denying individualist advancement to those deemed inferior. Never mind classism and misogyny, inherent to both individualist and collectivist, capitalist as well as socialist cultures, which constrain free choice for individuals from the start.

The suggestion you can (and must!) “find yourself (nothing less than exceptional!),” in an environment of – falsely advertised – unlimited choices, leads invariably to a sense of failure when you experience yourself unable to do just that.

Pure snake oil…..

And so we dream up a possible solution: rescue through love. If someone holds our image in their heart, we can become that person, find a “self”.

Except that is not how it works, a lesson this perceptive, empathetic, generous book imparts. You yourself have to overcome anomy, your alienation and lack of purpose, before you can truly connect.

” You can’t meet someone, love someone, if you don’t exist!” (p. 606.)

Preoccupation with who you are, implying belonging, or absence thereof, will not do the trick. Focus on what you can do – passionately acting in this world towards something meaningful – will allow the contours of a self to emerge.

Love matters, matters enormously, but it is an outcome of, not a precursor to, full personhood – a self not ruled by longing.

Will, of course, make ghost hounds more manageable as well!

Music today honors the ocean and eerie vibrations, Spirit Groove/ The Golden Sea in Shenzen.