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Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri |
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Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri |
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The Namesake |
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The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai |
The Namesake: A Novel (Edition 001)by Jhumpa Lahiri |
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Jhumpa Lahiri's debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, took the literary world by storm when it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. Fans who flocked to her stories will be captivated by her best-selling first novel, now in paperback for the first time. The Namesake is a finely wrought, deeply moving family drama that illuminates this acclaimed author's signature themes: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the tangled ties between generations.
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of an arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ashoke does his best to adapt while his wife pines for home. When their son, Gogol, is born, the task of naming him betrays their hope of respecting old ways in a new world. And we watch as Gogol stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs.
With empathy and penetrating insight, Lahiri explores the expectations bestowed on us by our parents and the means by which we come to define who we are.
From 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
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IT captivated me i do not know why.... -  |
The Namesake: A Novel Review |
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this book was boring and yet it captivated my attention throughout, i felt like i knew all the characters , Although it is not THE BEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN, its worth a read |
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You felt like you knew these people -  |
The Namesake: A Novel Review |
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She captures little idiosyncracies that are really authentic. You get attached to the characters. The ending (I don't want to spoil it for you so I wont tell you what happens at the end) makes you think wait what just happened. |
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not as good as the short story collections - |
The Namesake: A Novel Review |
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The 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 in The New Yorker, and I liked that version far better. I agree that Lahiri is among the best writers in the US currently, but short stories are her definite strength. |
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A great and superbly written story - |
The Namesake: A Novel Review |
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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. |
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Disappointing -  |
The Namesake: A Novel Review |
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Friends 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 lives. Even family death in this book reads like a newspaper report. The excrutiating detail of quotidian trivialites and what seemed like product placement forced me to skim paragraph after paragraph for the few existing, relevent bits of information from which to glean anything to make me care. As an immigrant's tale of living between two cultures it's been done many times better, many times before. Non-plot driven books don't have to be boring and I don't require an exciting page turner as long as there is some depth and talent in the writing. The author inserts "knowing" bits of local (mostly geographical) data about Boston, Calcutta, Yale and New York throughout the book, I'm not sure why. To prove she's been there? She utterly failed at evoking the torn "between-two-worlds" of her characters, and her descriptions of their physical surroundings can be found in any tour book or popular culture magazine advertisement. |
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