The Namesake: A Novel

• Interpreter of Maladies
• Unaccustomed Earth
• Purple Hibiscus: A Novel
• Ten Thousand Lovers
• Book of Negroes

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, ore 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

There are many things that Lahiri did in this book that really impressed me, but since I'm giving the book four stars, I will focus on four: 1. her treatment of time2. her usage of physical surroundings3. the tense and perspective of the narrative4. the universal and the particular

1. She is a master at shifting time. The book spans the life of Gogol from before his birth to about age thirty. It's very interesting to see how these characters change over the years. It was a relief for me to read a book that wasn't so episode oriented. This book "tells" a lot. Only a brilliant writer can get away with that and still manage to "show" you something. The time shifting is really what impressed me the most; the book has a great sense of movement. Lahiri gives us a moment by moment narrative and then sifts through months of events in a mere paragraph. She moves through years in just sentences.

2. The physical surroundings represent important ideas as well as represent what the characters are going through. Trains are a recurring location where significant things happen (Ashoke's accident; Gogol meets his first girlfriend). Gogol has an apartment in NYC that he's never in, representing his emptiness or whatever. The contrast of his 2nd girlfriend's parent's house to Gogol's parent's house represents a cultural divide. The fact that he gets married in a hotel represents the transience of his connection to his culture and of the marriage itself. And, of course there's the hotel in Ohio, although I won't give that away. This is a review not a synopsis.

3. Regarding the tense and perspective of the narrative. It is third person present tense. The present tense provides an immediacy while Lahiri at the same time manages to give the prose a meaningful voice. It is easy to lose a sense of authority without the past tense but Lahiri has a style that eloquently evades this. Third person perspective, as far as I'm concerned, is the superior form of narrative for a novel. Lahiri successfully brings us into the world of a young man and his parents. The only perspective that is lacking is that of the daughter, Sonia, Gogol's younger sister. But I think that one of the important things about the existence of the character Sonia is how she is a foil for Gogol.

4. The universal and the particular. What these character's all go through in The Namesake is the difficulty of identifying with the new world, the old one, or both. For those of us who don't have an old world to worry about identifying with, Lahiri still offers something about this experience that we can access. Read the book and find out what that is.

I give it four stars because the best is yet to come from this author.

Months pass, and the letter fails to appear; it seems it's been lost in the mail. Initially, the Gangulis aren't too worried, because Bengalis often aren't officially named for months or even years; but the American system demands a name immediately. Meanwhile, the great-grandmother has fallen severely ill, and is in no state to reveal baby names. Running out of time, Ashoke names his son "Gogol," after his favorite Russian writer, a name that has immense personal significance to him. But to young Gogol, the name is a burden, a disfigurement, an ugly reminder of the many differences between him and his peers. As he grows up, Gogol embarks on a bitter love-hate relationship with his name; he loathes it, he denies it, he tries to escape it. Only when Gogol has made peace with his ethnic background and his family's traditions can he learn to accept his identity.

Lahiri, known for her critically adored short-story collection The Interpreter of Maladies, makes her debut as a novelist with this work. Her writing is understated and simple, but beautifully evocative and filled with sensory detail. Though much is necessarily omitted in a story that covers several decades in under three hundred pages, Lahiri chooses her words deftly, focusing on quotidian scenes of startling intimacy to make the reader feel close to the characters. Which is not to say her characters are incomplete or undeveloped; though more development would be welcome, the characters still feel well-thought-out and complex, and their relationships with each other are believable and sympathetic.

Focusing on themes of displacement and foreignness, and the bewildering and alienating process of assimilating into a new society, The Namesake is powerful and genuine, blending humor and drama into a realistic portrait of a family. Given their struggle to retain their heritage while becoming fully integrated into their new country, and the resulting confusion of identity that trickles down the generations, what is, perhaps, most surprising in the end is how all-American the Gangulis really are. I truly enjoyed this novel, and I think you will, too. In addition, I'd like to recommend another recent Amazon purchase, 'The Losers' Club: Complete Restored Edition' by Richard Perez, an unconventional and highly entertaining little novel I can't stop thinking about.

• Subjects > Nonfiction > Education
• Subjects > Literature & Fiction > United States > Asian American
• Subjects > Literature & Fiction > United States

• Amazon.ca : The Namesake: A Novel