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🇲🇽 Mexico /Culture & Society

“Nationalisms impose terror on minorities”: Kiran Desai

From El Universal · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Interview Named sources Context piece
  • Kiran Desai’s novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny follows two young Indians, Sonia and Sunny, across countries and decades as they confront identity, migration, art and belonging.
  • Desai distinguishes painful “loneliness” from the potentially enriching experience of “solitude,” while presenting both as changing forms of being alone.
  • She also connects loneliness to political experiences, including nations displaced from themselves by colonial history or the gaze of more powerful countries.

Kiran Desai’s new novel brings together two young Indians who feel like outsiders in different ways. Sonia studies in cold Vermont while trying to become a novelist, living a reality that feels as false as the paintings of Ilan, her boyfriend, who quietly looks down on her. Sunny, a stalled journalist in New York, blames his mother for raising him so Westernized that he would always remain a foreigner in his own country.

A chance meeting on a train connects the two characters in The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, published by Salamandra in 2026. The novel moves through decades and countries, from India to Italy, the United States and Mexico. Along the way, Desai explores the place of art today, globalization, colonialism, the need for identity, migration, loneliness and the feeling of belonging everywhere and nowhere.

For Desai, the Spanish word soledad contains several meanings, from sadness to strength. She distinguishes between the English words “loneliness” and “solitude.” Loneliness carries the more painful and traumatic meaning, while solitude can describe the beauty and appeal of being alone. It can be an enriching state, even one a person longs for.

Loneliness represents the more painful side, and solitude a more positive feeling, the beauty of being alone and the charm of solitude.

· Kiran DesaiDesai distinguishes the two English meanings translated into Spanish as “soledad.”

Desai says solitude can create the space to understand oneself or become something more, away from people who watch and tell us what we should be. In the novel, Sonia’s loneliness begins with disconnection from her identity and the loss of her sense of self through an abusive relationship. It later changes into a beautiful artistic solitude.

The idea also has a political dimension. Desai speaks of a nation that feels displaced from itself, perhaps because of its colonial history or because it lives under the gaze of a more powerful country. Loneliness, she suggests, is not a universal experience lived in the same way by everyone. It is a particular way of inhabiting the world, shaped by context and circumstance.

Solitude can be an enriching and desired state, while loneliness has a more traumatic connotation.

· Kiran DesaiShe explains why the novel treats being alone as both painful and potentially transformative.
About this summary

Originally published by El Universal in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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