Namesake

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Namesake

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Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies customary this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her tales are one of the very few debut works — and only a handful of collections — to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many additional awards and honors it received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America. In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail — the fleeting moment, the turn of axiom — that opens whole worlds of emotion.
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family tree from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family tree. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing ancient ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings fantastic empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching like affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as “a writer of uncommon elegance and poise.” The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity.

Amazon.com Review
Any talk of The Namesake–Jhumpa Lahiri’s follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Interpreter of Maladies–must start with a name: Gogol Ganguli. Born to an Indian literary and his wife, Gogol is afflicted from birth with a name that is neither Indian nor American nor even really a first name at all. He is agreed the name by his father who, before he came to America to study at MIT, was nearly killed in a train wreck in India. Rescuers caught sight of the volume of Nikolai Gogol’s fleeting tales that he held, and hauled him from the train. Ashoke gives his American-born son the name as a kind of placeholder, and the awkward thing sticks.

Awkwardness is Gogol’s birthright. He grows up a bright American boy, goes to Yale, has pretty girlfriends, becomes a successful architect, but like many second-generation immigrants, he can never reasonably find his place in the world. There’s a lovely section where he dates a wealthy, cultured young Manhattan woman who lives with her charming parents. They fold Gogol into their simple, elegant life, but even here he can find no peace and he breaks off the relationship. His mother finally sets him up on a blind date with the daughter of a Bengali friend, and Gogol thinks he has establish his match. Moushumi, like Gogol, is at odds with the Indian-American world she inhabits. She has establish, but, a circuitous escape: “At Brown, her uprising had been literary … she’d pursued a double major in French. Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge–she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, lacking guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind.” Lahiri documents these silent rebellions and random longings with fantastic sensitivity. There’s no cleverness or showing-off in The Namesake, just perfectly confident storytelling. Gogol’s tale is neither comedy nor tragedy; it’s simply that ordinary, hard-to-get-down-on-paper commodity: real life. –Claire Dederer

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