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The Namesake: A Novel
Books: CookBooks: Chutney: Item 2
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The Namesake: A Novelby Jhumpa Lahiri
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65 of 75 people found the following review helpful: A Novel Idea, August 11, 2004 Reviewer:Richard Nelson (Chicago, IL) - You can't love a book as much as I loved Interpreter of Maladies and not seek out anything else by the author. Lahiri's new book, published in 2003 and now available in paperback, is a novel rather than a collection of short stories, and I can't help but note that despite my preference for the novel form, Lahiri was in the right line of work before. The Namesake has moments of breathtaking beauty, and I enjoyed it--very much, in fact. Indeed, it feels like one of Lahiri's short stories about an Indian immigrant expanded to fill a novel, or even like a series of short stories about the same people, but disjointed. Rather than following a plot, Lahiri follows a life; this is a brave and admirable choice that causes the novel to meander just as a life does. My fear is that some readers will find it unexciting; Lahiri's stories each pack a punch within pages, but this is a slow burn. Still, well worth the time; you'll care deeply about "the namesake" by the time you're through.
Book Description
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.
About The Author
Lahiri was born in 1967 in London, England, and raised in Rhode Island. She has traveled several times to India, where both her parents were born and raised, and where a number of the stories in Interpreter of Maladies are set. She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in English literature, and of Boston University, where she received an M.A. in English, M.A. in Creative Writing and M.A. in Comparative Studies in literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. A winner of the Henfield Prize from the Transatlantic Review, she has published stories in The New Yorker, Agni, Story Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her stories will appear in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories. Jhumpa received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her collection of short stories, INTERPRETER OF MALADIES.
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