The Namesake
A Novel
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4.5 • 84 Ratings
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- $9.99
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One of the most anticipated books of the year, Lahiri's first novel (after 1999's Pulitzer Prize winning Interpreter of Maladies) amounts to less than the sum of its parts. Hopscotching across 25 years, it begins when newlyweds Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli emigrate to Cambridge, Mass., in 1968, where Ashima immediately gives birth to a son, Gogol a pet name that becomes permanent when his formal name, traditionally bestowed by the maternal grandmother, is posted in a letter from India, but lost in transit. Ashoke becomes a professor of engineering, but Ashima has a harder time assimilating, unwilling to give up her ties to India. A leap ahead to the '80s finds the teenage Gogol ashamed of his Indian heritage and his unusual name, which he sheds as he moves on to college at Yale and graduate school at Columbia, legally changing it to Nikhil. In one of the most telling chapters, Gogol moves into the home of a family of wealthy Manhattan WASPs and is initiated into a lifestyle idealized in Ralph Lauren ads. Here, Lahiri demonstrates her considerable powers of perception and her ability to convey the discomfort of feeling "other" in a world many would aspire to inhabit. After the death of Gogol's father interrupts this interlude, Lahiri again jumps ahead a year, quickly moving Gogol into marriage, divorce and a role as a dutiful if a bit guilt-stricken son. This small summary demonstrates what is most flawed about the novel: jarring pacing that leaves too many emotional voids between chapters. Lahiri offers a number of beautiful and moving tableaus, but these fail to coalesce into something more than a modest family saga. By any other writer, this would be hailed as a promising debut, but it fails to clear the exceedingly high bar set by her previous work.
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!