The Namesake | Jhumpa Lahiri | A great and superbly written story

The Namesake | Jhumpa Lahiri | Tale of a 1st generation Indian immigrant - different!

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The Namesake

	The Namesake Jhumpa Lahiri Flamingo, 2004 - 291 pages average customer review:based on 475 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors it received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America.
In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail -- the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase -- that opens whole worlds of emotion.
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.
Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.
The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity.

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A great and superbly written story

Jhumpa Lahiri writes about a very interesting and commonly neglected new American phenomenon: the rise of the Indian-American middle class.

This book is about cultures, values, life and death, love and misery. It is about America. It is about India. It is also universal.

Lahiri writes with style and elegance. Despite the verbose, I was engaged on the story and how it unfolded. "Namesake" is a great reading.

Tale of a 1st generation Indian immigrant - different!

I read this book because my daughter's freshman college class was asked to read it, so I knew it must be something pretty special. It's not a book I would have been likely to pick up otherwise.

Though my grandfather was a first generation Italian, I think the book was so unique to me because I knew very little about the Indian culture.

It was a beautifully told story and portrayed well the tension that a first generation American feels, wanting to fit in and sometimes ashamed of his parents' eccentricities, yet grateful for the sacrifices they've made to provide for their children.

Worth the read!

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not as good as the short story collections

The Namesake, the first novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, is written
in a deceptively simple style. It is a very well crafter novel that
both explores the role of Indians in America, and tells the
story of a family over several decades.
Unfortunately, I have to say that I was somewhat disappointed
by the novel. Lahiri's collection of stories, "The Interpreter
of Maladies" had a much larger impact on me. A version of "The Namesake"
also appeared as a short story in The New Yorker, and I liked that
version far better. I agree that Lahiri is among the best writers in
the US currently, but short stories are her definite strength.

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