The Namesake

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Brought up in America by a mother who wanted to raise her children to be Indian, she learned about her Bengali heritage from an early age. Soon after his (very detailed) birth near the beginning of the book, the main character is temporarily named Gogol by his parents because the letter containing the name chosen for him by his Bengali great grandmother hasn't yet arrived in Boston. A banker in Paris, Graham, an American, moves back to America with Moushumi, and they plan a life together.

An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. Although Ashoke and Ashima try to raise their children according to Bengali cultural practices, they often find themselves competing with Gogol and Sonia’s desires to live like their American friends. I'm putting the emphasis on ‘several’ because it took me a long time to read it even though I was in a hurry to finish.We understand that not everyone can donate right now, but if you can afford to contribute, we promise it will be put to good use. Jhumpa Lahiri crafts a novel full of introspection and quiet emotion as she tells the story of the immigrant experience of one Bengali family, the Gangulis. One of the Gangulis’ Bengali customs is hosting house parties for all of their Bengali American friends. Ashley, gauntly handsome in a Lord Mountbatten sort of way, with fine sand-colored hair swept back from his temples, arrives to examine her progress. It explores many of the same emotional and cultural themes as Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies.

Only Ashoke’s death is powerful enough to pull Gogol back to his Bengali roots, forcing him to negotiate an identity that is both American and Bengali rather than seeing the two cultures as irreconcilable. The family settles into life in Cambridge, with Ashima learning to take Gogol around on her errands. The father has picked the temporary name Gogol because he owes his life to the fact that he was sitting close to a window reading Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ when a train he was traveling on crashed, and therefore escaped. She keeps the affair from Gogol for several months, but eventually Nikhil catches her in a lie, and she admits all to him. Il figlio, però, non apprezza e non capisce la scelta, anche perché sarà necessario parecchio tempo prima che ne scopra l’origine: suo padre custodisce il segreto.

She is asked to remove her Murshidabad silk sari in favor of a flowered cotton gown that, to her mild embarrassment, only reaches her knees.

After turning down a dissertation fellowship in Paris, Moushumi begins feeling stifled by her relationship with Gogol. He tries to keep his past completely separate from his new life and persona in college; no one from Yale knows that his legal name was once “Gogol. The two hit it off, surprised at the ways in which their familiarity and similar backgrounds draw them together, since both have tried hard to distance themselves from their past. There's a lot of local color of Boston including things I remember from the old days like the Boston Globe newspaper, the ‘girls on the Boston Common,’ name brands like Hood milk, Jordan Marsh and Filene’s Basement.

Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. She feels lonely and homesick in America, clinging to letters from her family and devising makeshift Indian recipes with the ingredients she can scrounge together.