I read an excellent review of Jhumpa Lahiri's
The Namesake in the NST today.
US cover 
UK cover
New Straits Time, Wednesday June 16, 2004
Yearnings of A Migrant Family
by Rahel Joseph
THE NAMESAKE
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Houghton Miffin, pp291
As the first-time author of the critically-acclaimed collection of short stories,
The Interpreter o f Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri became the toast of the publishing world when she won both the Pen Hemingway Award and the Pulitzer Prize far Fiction at the age of 34. Three years later, she returns with her first full-length work, her quietly monumental novel,
The Namesake.
In its simplest form, the novel traces the story of two generations of the Ganguli family. It begins with Gogol's parents, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, who leave their home in Calcutta in 1966 for a new life in the United States.
As with all new migrants anywhere, the young couple have to find their own footing in a country where "it is not at all what she had expected. Not at all like the houses in Gone with the Wind or The Seven Year Itch, movies she'd seen with her brother and cousins at the Lighthouse and the Metro" and where being an immigrant "is a sort of lifelong pregnancy -- a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts."
While the loneliness of the early years is apparent, especially in the case of
Ashima who has to cope with a new marriage in an alien country with none of the support of her extended family, they soon find themselves having to adapt to their new life.
This is vividly described by Lahiri in the very first paragraph when Ashima, homesick and pregnant, makes her favourite Bengali snack,
bhel puri, in her American kitchen.
"Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of her Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts, and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon juice; thin slices of green chilli pepper, wishing there were mustard ail to pour into the mix. Ashima has been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout India, spilling from newspaper canes."
Eventually, with the help of a few Bengali friends, and long letters from their families in India, the Gangulis soon settle into their new life in Massachusetts.
But it is with the birth of their son, Gogol, that the novel really begins to take form. For it is Gogol who is the protagonist of the novel and it is through the lens of his life that the narrative of the book takes shape.
Hastily named far the Russian author, Nikolai Gogol (when a letter from his great-grandmother with the suggestion for his "proper" Indian name fails to arrive from Calcutta), Gogol grows up resenting the strangeness of his name - neither Indian nor American and when he goes to college, decides to reinvent himself as "Nikhil".
It is by the name Nikhil that he graduates, qualifies as an architect, and embarks on a series of love affairs, eventually marrying his childhood friend and fellow Bengali, Moushumi.
It is only years later that Gogol discovers the roots of his name through a letter his father writes him, Ashoke was travelling on a train in India which derailed and nearly cost him his life. It was only the fluttering of a page in the book he was reading at the time that helped rescuers spot him.
The book was
The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol. It was on that same train ride that Ashoke also met a stranger who gave him the advice that would see him leave India to move to America, thus changing the fortunes of the Ganguli family forever:
"Do yourself a favour. Before it's too late, without thinking too much about it at first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day, it will be too late.
This is a book which encompasses a myriad of themes: emigration, assimilation, identity: this is on one level, the story of the émigré leaving home in pursuit of the American Dream; on another, the story of the children of those immigrants, growing up as a hybrid of two cultures, torn between their sense of duty to please their parents and their own yearnings to create a place of their own in the society in which they now live.
Through the literary conceit of Gogol's name, Lahiri is able to convey the character's sense of isolation, his desire to discard the burden of his family's heritage, to recreate his awn identity, his sense of self.
But more than anything else, this is a novel about a family, about the relationship between a father and son, in all its tenuous fragility. In Lahiri's beautifully measured narrative, the novel weaves an intimate family portrait, giving us characters that are so real and true that we remember them long after we finish reading the book.
Written with great sympathy and humanity,
The Namesake cements Lahiri's position as one of the finest American writers of her generation and reminds us that no matter how far we travel, we can never truly leave home.
Here's an
excerpt of the book from About.com.
Must go get it!
Other reviews:
New York Times
Sydney Morning Herald
Another NY Times review
Washington Post
EW Woman
The UK Guardian
