The Namesake: A Novel
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- ISBN13: 9780618485222
- Condition: USED – VERY GOOD
- Notes:
Product Description
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family tree from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of an arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ashoke does his best to adapt while his wife pines for home. When their son, Gogol, is born, the task of naming him betrays their hope of respecting ancient ways in a new world. And we watch as Gogol stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching like affairs.
With empathy and penetrating insight, Lahiri explores the expectations bestowed on us by our parents and the means by which we come to define who we are.
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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This product arrived looking like it had been dug out of a barrel, pages bent and dirty looking. I haven’t wanted to pick it up and read it.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I don’t want to be harsh, but this book didn’t go me. There’s lots of east coast “society” references in this book which did nothing for me at all, lots of cooking references for things like creme brulee, which did even less, some talk about Prada shoes or something like that and all along I was thinking “Where’s India”? Nowhere to be establish. It seems like the main conflict of the tale was a relationship gone incorrect, but this happened so late in the book that it seemed pointless by then, and then it was kind of glossed over so as to seem unimportant anyway. The leader is very excellent at explaining details but not automatically emotion. She very regularly puts the action in the present tense which is curious, and started to seem like a contrivance. I didn’t find much flavor in this tale: no rising conflict, no action or suspense, it was just a bunch of featureless tasting pudding – like a flavorless creme brulee.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Even though this book was perfectly written, the tale was painfully dull!! Usually it takes me a few days to end a book twice as long – and this one took me nearly two weeks!
Also recommended: Dan Brown, Nora Roberts, Scott Turow, Nelsen DeMille, Linda Scottoline and the Harry Potter books.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Having read Interpreter of Maladies by Lahiri, I keenly awaited her novel, The Namesake. Interpreter of Maladies was well-written, contained characters that drew the reader to them, and packed a lot of action in each fleeting tale.
But, The Namesake was dissapointing. It is not as well-written as Interpreter of Maladies. The characters lack that something that draws the reader to care about them. The tale is really a fleeting tale that has been stretched out to a novel lengh, filled in with unimportant detail.
The tale line is too predictable and there is small urgency in the writing. Where is the crisis to solve? If the main character dislikes his name so much, then he should change it. End of tale.
The bottom line: Read Interpreter of Maladies, delight in a fine collection of fleeting tales, but do not waste your time with The Namesake.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
The leader could have chosen to weave an exciting tale of a family tree trying to adopt a new country, trying to merge cultures together, of the positives (along with some negatives) inherently linked with such experiences. Life anyway is full of struggles and problems, we do not need a book to remind us of persons things again and again. People cheat on spouses, place their parents and disaffect themselved from their culture, to adopt a new one. But what’s the point in dwelling on just the negativity linked with these things? Lives are also full of excellent things, veteran with excellent people. For example, the book makes a huge fuss about the name of the main character. Its absurd to reflect that a name would ever be a huge issue in modern day America. And yet, somehow, from page to page the leader reminds us that the main character despises his name, then despises himself for having despised his name, ad nauseum.
Not to mention that in the end everyone ends up being lonely, leaving the reader depressed as well. Not at all recommended.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5