The Namesake

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And although I read it in relatively few days I still read it very very slowly. There are a lot of words in this book. This novel is not just a relatable read for immigrants, it is also an elegantly told family saga with universal themes; of love, of the profound relationship between a father and a son, of teenage angst, of feeling pulled by different worlds yet not completely belonging to either, of the unpredictability of life and relationships and of endings which are real and not always happily ever after.

This is the experience for Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli and it is probably made worse by the fact that India and America have such totally different cultures. The story follows their lives for 32 years from when Ashima is pregnant and facing delivering her first child the American way without the comfort of her extended Indian family and all their social customs to help her. Names and trains are recurring motifs in this long spanning narrative. Time and again we read of the way in which names alter others’ and our perception of ourselves. Train journeys provide characters with life-changing experiences: from near misses with death to startling realisations.Those lines vouch for how beautifully Jhumpa Lahiri has portrayed the struggle of emigrants’ life in West. Her depiction of conflict of cultures faced by the second generation emigrants is interesting. In 2001, she married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then Deputy Editor of TIME Latin America Lahiri currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. She has been a Vice President of the PEN American Center since 2005. My hometown Jamshedpur is mentioned twice in the novel and just seeing its name in print gave me a thrill. It is the city where Ashoke was headed to when he had his train accident. I have lived in Boston and I have lived in Kolkata for three years each and I love both of those cities. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2010-07-13 15:36:57 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA118806 Boxid_2 BWB220140909 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City [New Hampshire Containerid_2 X0001 Donor

Artios Awards". www.castingsociety.com. Archived from the original on 26 March 2020 . Retrieved 10 October 2022. Gogol’s identity change to “Nikhil” becomes official in Chapters 5 and 6. Deciding that he wants to begin college as “Nikhil,” Gogol legally changes his name before starting his undergraduate study at Yale University. 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.” Gogol dates a fellow Yale student named Ruth, but they break up before the end of college. Gogol takes regular trips home to visit his family in Boston, and on one of these trips Ashoke tells Gogol the story of the train crash that influenced his choice of Gogol’s name. He hates that his name is both absurd and obscure, that it has nothing to do with who he is, that it is neither Indian nor American but of all things Russian. He hates having to live with it, with a pet name turned good name, day after day, second after second… At times his name, an entity shapeless and weightless, manages nevertheless to distress him physically, like the scratchy tag of a shirt he has been forced permanently to wear." Mainly we follow the coming-of-age story of a young man named Gogol Ganguli. His father gave him that first name because he had a traumatic event in his life during which he met a man who had told him about the Russian author Nikolai Gogol. The father survived the event and later became a fan of the author. (This book inspired me to read or re-read some of Gogol’s classic short stories including The Overcoat and The Nose.) urn:lcp:namesakelahi00lahi:epub:c844dd23-8a4a-466c-93f6-dcc8f1a4fa3c Extramarc Cornell University Foldoutcount 0 Identifier namesakelahi00lahi Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t90878z5z Isbn 0618485228We get glimpses of how the cultural differences affect his parents too. It’s not until she is 47 that his stay-at-home mother makes her real first non-Indian friends, working part-time at the local library. Gogol continues his life in New York, though he visits his mother and sister in Boston more frequently. Ashima sets Gogol up with Moushumi, a family friend from Pemberton Road, who now studies for a French-literature PhD in New York. Gogol and Moushumi initially resist this blind date, but find that they like and understand one another. They continue dating and soon fall in love. After about a year, they marry in a large Bengali ceremony in New Jersey, near where Moushumi’s parents now live. They rent an apartment together downtown. The 'name' issue is interesting but it's a bit of a stretch on the author's part to make it the central framework for the entire saga. I tried hard to relate the story of ‘The Overcoat’ to the main character's life in an effort to understand everything better, but apart from wondering if his yearning for an ideal name could be compared to Akaki’s yearning for the perfect overcoat, I was lost.

This theme is born out in Gogol’s different romantic relationships. With Maxine, Gogol feels that the Ratliff family is fundamentally different from his own, that he does not understand their “city” lifestyle. This causes Gogol to enjoy it, to cherish it, especially the time they spend in the woods of New Hampshire. This, in contrast to Moushumi, with whom Gogol shares a great many cultural ties. But Moushumi longs for a foreign life that does not, ultimately, include Gogol. Despite their Bengali-American heritage, Moushumi grow apart, become foreign to one another, because Moushumi longs for a different set of experiences, and for a different kind of relationship. The Formation of Identity This book tells a story which must be familiar to anyone who has migrated to another country - the fact that having made the transition to a new culture you are left missing the old and never quite achieving full admittance into the new. In fact a feeling of never quite belonging to either.Gogol grows to despise his name, and is deeply embarrassed by his namesake—the author Nikolai Gogol—and by the fact that the name is not linked to any part of his identity. He does not yet know the story of his father’s train accident. When he is eighteen, he decides to legally change his name to Nikhil, and when he leaves home for Yale this is the name that will follow him. It is as Nikhil that he meets his first love, Ruth, an English major who never meets his parents, even though the two are together for more than two years. They break up after Ruth spends a semester (and then a summer) abroad in England. Nikhil’s escape from the world of “Gogol” is still incomplete, though, as every other weekend he travels home, where his family stubbornly persists in calling him by his pet name. Enjoyed reading about the Bengali culture, their traditions, envied their sense and closeness of family. Ashima and Ashoke, an arranged marriage, moving to the USA where Ashoke is an engineer, trying to learn a different way of life, different language, so very difficult. Ashima misses her family, and after giving birth to a son misses them even more. They name their son, Gogol, there is a reason for this name, a name he will come to disdain. Eventually the family meets other Bengalis and they become family substitutes, celebrate important cultural milestones together. In Chapters 3 and 4, Gogol grows up as a Bengali American child with a name that is neither Bengali nor American. Although his parents decide to give him the formal Bengali name “Nikhil” when he begins kindergarten, Gogol refuses to respond to the name so his school teachers call him by his legal name, “Gogol.” Gogol’s younger sister is born, a girl named Sonali and called “Sonia.” 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. It explores many of the same emotional and cultural themes as her Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies. Themes Change, and its Dependence on Stability; The Universality of “Foreignness”; the Formation of Identity

Chapters 1 and 2 narrate the story of the Gangulis’ early days in America. Ashoke decided to move to Boston and begin graduate school after barely surviving a catastrophic train accident in India. A few years later, his parents and Ashima’s parents arranged their marriage, and Ashima left Calcutta to join Ashoke in Boston. As the novel begins, the two of them are going to a Boston hospital because Ashima is in labor with their first child. This story starts in 1968 and continues somewhere in the year 2000. At first glance it seems as if it is about Ashima, the expectant mother who has left her family in India and must assimilate in America with her new husband, an engineering student. She is hopelessly dependent upon her husband, and fearlessly determined to keep her arranged marriage in tact. However, her son, Gogol, or Nikhil, is really the core of this story. Gogol, an architect, is named after The Overcoat man himself, Nikolai Gogol, a writer whose storytelling pacing Lahiri seems to emulate. Gogol's struggle with his name is reflective of the fears most young Americans from immigrant families face: being treated differently because of a name, an accent, traditions, parents who are blatantly non-American. The name is a symbolic addition that morphs at different phases in the novel, adding nuance to delicate inner thoughts.Sciretta, Peter (27 November 2007). "Independent Spirit Awards Nominations: A Look At The Best Indie Films Of 2007". /Film. Archived from the original on 10 October 2022 . Retrieved 10 October 2022. Yet, in spite of these fated moments, Lahiri’s novel possesses an atmosphere that is at once graceful and ordinary. The language she chooses has this quiet quality that makes that which she writes all the more realistic. Her most insightful observations into her characters, or the dynamics between them, often occur when she is recounting seemingly mundane scenes: from food preparations and family meals to phone conversations.