The Namesake: A Novel

The Namesake: A Novel
by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Namesake: A Novel
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Book Summary Information

Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Edition: Paperback
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2004-09-01
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Mariner Books

Book Reviews of The Namesake: A Novel

Book Review: The Journey of an Immigrant
Summary: 3 Stars

He does not want his name. He does not want to be the quiet, obedient boy he's always been. He does not want to be a part of the Bengali traditions and parties and arranged marriages.

He is Gogol Ganguli, child of Indian immigrants, and one who wishes to be as American as his birth certificate. He seizes control of his own life at eighteen: he changes his name to Nikhil, and attempts to reinvent himself through college. He parties, he drinks, he has a few long-term and disastrous love affairs. And yet, after all his trouble to disengage himself from the life he has grown up with, he begins to return to it after his father's death. Their shared heritage is his only link to his father, and he returns to some of the Bengali ways and customs. He wants to be near his family again, and he starts dating a Bengali girl.

The Namesake, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, is ultimately about family themes. Heritage. Rebellion. The search for an identity. Love. The Ganguli family must learn to relate to each other, to overcome challenges, to accept each other's choices.

The book provokes discussions and realizations about the difficulties faced by immigrants; it draws the reader into the heartache of living in two worlds and being a part of none of them. It showcases the struggles of a family seeking to find where they belong and trying to adapt to the new culture around them, and it also displays the trying times that are a part of any family and will resonate with any reader.

Ultimately, however, I found this to be a depressing book. Despite how hard he tries, Gogol seems to be running in the wrong direction, and by thirty he has made somewhat of a mess of his life. It's a starkly realistic book, which perhaps is not my taste anyway, but it does open the reader's eyes to cultural complexities.

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Summary of The Namesake: A Novel

Jhumpa Lahiri's debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, took the literary world by storm when it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. Fans who flocked to her stories will be captivated by her best-selling first novel, now in paperback for the first time. The Namesake is a finely wrought, deeply moving family drama that illuminates this acclaimed author's signature themes: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the tangled ties between generations.
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family 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 old ways in a new world. And we watch as Gogol stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love 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.

Any talk of The Namesake--Jhumpa Lahiri's follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Interpreter of Maladies--must begin with a name: Gogol Ganguli. Born to an Indian academic 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 given the name by his father who, before he came to America to study at MIT, was almost killed in a train wreck in India. Rescuers caught sight of the volume of Nikolai Gogol's short stories 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 quite 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 easy, 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 found his match. Moushumi, like Gogol, is at odds with the Indian-American world she inhabits. She has found, however, a circuitous escape: "At Brown, her rebellion had been academic ... 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, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind." Lahiri documents these quiet rebellions and random longings with great sensitivity. There's no cleverness or showing-off in The Namesake, just beautifully confident storytelling. Gogol's story 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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