The namesake
(Book)

Jhumpa Lahiri brings to her terrifically poignant first novel the remarkable powers of emotion. The Namesake enriches and expands on her signature themes: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and the tangled ties between generations. The Namesake journeys with the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in India through their fraught transformation into Americans. Ashoke Ganguli arrives in Massachusetts at the end of the 1960s, shortly after his arranged marriage in Calcutta, to pursue an engineering degree. Unlike her new husband, Ashima Ganguli resists all things American and pines for her family back home. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the confusions of respecting old ways in 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 antic name. Lahiri follows Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching relationships. Spanning three decades and crossing continents, The Namesake is at every moment intimate, as Lahiri brilliantly swoops in on the perfect detail and revelatory emotion that open whole worlds in a phrase. Readers who flocked to Interpreter of Maladies will find The Namesake even more elegant, subtle, and deeply affecting.