The Namesake
A Novel
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4.4 • 90 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations. Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity from “a writer of uncommon elegance and poise.” (The New York Times)
Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home in this immersive family saga. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world — conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding coming-of-age path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs.
"Dazzling...An intimate, closely observed family portrait."—The New York Times
"Hugely appealing."—People Magazine
"An exquisitely detailed family saga."—Entertainment Weekly
One name, given in tribute to a Russian author. A lifetime of trying to escape it.
Customer Reviews
the immigrant experience
“Being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy-a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts.”
Gogol’s father, a university professor goes back to India to find a wife who will come to America. His wife is, in many ways, ill-suited for life in this new place. They adapt, but they don’t assimilate. Soon his parents find their place “befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happen to share.” It takes much longer for Gogol to find his way. Born in America, but of another culture, Gogol will always be different than his American friends and aloof from the Bengalis. His name, that of a famous Russian author, is “both absurd and obscure”. So when he is eighteen, he changes it. Unsurprisingly, that does not change him. He is still Gogol. He must, as any first generation American knows, find himself. And “himself” is forever tied to, but never defined by, his heritage.
Here thanks to English 100!
I read this book for a college course that I’m taking and I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did. It’s a great story about change and growing up. It’s a coming of age story that centralizes its focus on family. It started off as a chore to read, but quickly became something more! Worth a look!