|
|
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Dewey Decimal Number: 813 EAN: 9780002259019 ISBN: 000225901X Label: Flamingo Manufacturer: Flamingo Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 291 Publication Date: 2004-01 Publisher: Flamingo Studio: Flamingo Editorial Review: Amazon.com Review: Any talk of The Namesake--Jhumpa Lahiri's follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Interpreter of Maladies--must begin with a name: Gogol Ganguli. Born to an Indian academic and his wife, Gogol is afflicted from birth with a name that is neither Indian nor American nor even really a first name at all. He is given the name by his father who, before he came to America to study at MIT, was almost killed in a train wreck in India. Rescuers caught sight of the volume of Nikolai Gogol's short stories that he held, and hauled him from the train. Ashoke gives his American-born son the name as a kind of placeholder, and the awkward thing sticks. 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, or 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 Product Description: 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. Average Rating:
 Rating: - not as good as the short story collectionsThe 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 ... Read More Rating:  - 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. Rating:  - DisappointingFriends say that I should have read "Interpreter of Maladies" first, since this book isn't a reflection of the author's real talent. Unfortunately, I was so disappointed by this book that it will take quite a nudge to get me to read her earlier books. This book is boring, prose uninspired and characters one dimensional. What did I learn about the characters? Only Gogol's parents were half-way interesting and all we get about them is present tense, descriptive reporting on their past and current ... Read More Rating: - 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 ... Read More Rating: - Aspiring Yuppies Indian-styleBeing a great fan of Lahiri's short fiction, for example, A Temporary Matter, I found none of that complexity in this novel. There is no plot in terms of conflict or dilemma -- the biggest mover of the book is time passing. While the parents' experience at assimilation was interesting, their nostalgia for India very sympathetic, the children were flat characters. Gogol's most compelling conflict is if he'll dump his family for his girlfriend's idealized WASP family (painted in the label-conscious colors of ... Read More |
