The Namesake: A Novel
by Jhumpa Lahiri
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Book Reviews of The Namesake: A Novel
Book Review: A name is a name is a name is a....
Summary: 4 Stars
Every good Italian worth her weight in pasta knows that March 19 is the Feast of Saint Joseph. The Italians revere Saint Joseph in the same way the Mexicans have a soft spot for the Virgin Mary. And so every March 19, two days after my second generation Irish mother had boiled the cabbage and corned beef in honor of Saint Patrick, she would find herself once again in the kitchen this time to make for my father, a first generation Italian, one of his favorite desserts. Year after year, like another birthday on our family's calendar, the Feast of Saint Joseph was celebrated (san bougies) with éclairs, cream puffs, a rich chocolate cake, or a perfect cocoanut cream pie, whatever my father pleased. For this saint, the widower of the New Testament who became the father to Christ, was also my father's namesake.
And because Joseph was my father's namesake, it became my brothers' namesake as well. According to Italian tradition, or so my grandmother instructed, the first son is named for his father as my father had been. Although my mother was gracious in accepting instruction from my grandmother when it came to spicing up her spaghetti sauce, she was not afraid to ask for terms when it came to naming her children. A compromise was reached, and while my oldest brother was baptized with his father's name, it was understood that this first son would be known to the world by his middle name--a separate name--instead. My younger brother was thus freed from this tradition by his place in the birth order; nevertheless, he is linked to this humble carpenter and the celebrations of March 19 because Joseph became his middle name.
Proof, indeed, that we are more than who we say we are.
Enter our dear Gogol in Lahiri's tale, whose first name belongs to an entirely different story of family and tradition. Caught in his own personal mess of growing up, and growing away from all of the customs his parents' immigrant world represents, Gogol comes to believe that changing his name will liberate him from a past he no longer wishes to understand. When he discovers for himself that there is no such thing as a perfect name, Gogol concludes that until we reach eighteen and can undertake the task of naming ourselves, pronouns should prevail. And yet, if we never heard our names held safely on our parents' tongues, then, where exactly would our stories begin? How would we come to know who we were meant to be? After all, we rarely go forward without going back. For we are, all of us, the heirs of Epictetus' compass whose needle points eternally home.
Like a good porter, Lahiri leads us through this first-generation story with great tenderness and a reverence for that someplace else where some of us began. She reminds us that our destination is just as often a surprise as it is something we can plan. Lahiri underscores this central theme by giving Gogol, son and heir to all that was not planned, a name that is the result of two accidents. And in all of Gogol's attempts to reconcile what was something unintended, we learn right along with him that, more often than not, it is the randomness that constitutes our lives. We are all wanderers not certain of our names, our countries of origin, our birthright. None of it belongs to us anyway, according to Rumi. Our real country, he wrote many centuries ago, is not where we are but where we are heading.
Book Review: Literary Greatness
Summary: 4 Stars
Lahiri is an extremely skilled writer and I look forward to reading what is to come from her impending lifetime of literary greatness. Put aside the fact that she won the Pulitzer for her debut short story collection, for a first novel, The Namesake is literary greatness. Try reading the first novel of Faulkner or Updike and getting past the first ten pages without throwing the book out of the window. If she keeps writing prolifically (I heard in an interview that it took two years for her to write this book) she may eventually win another Pulitzer and possibly the Nobel Prize in Literature.There are many things that Lahiri did in this book that really impressed me, but since I'm giving the book four stars, I will focus on four:
1. her treatment of time
2. her usage of physical surroundings
3. the tense and perspective of the narrative
4. the universal and the particular
1. She is a master at shifting time. The book spans the life of Gogol from before his birth to about age thirty. It's very interesting to see how these characters change over the years. It was a relief for me to read a book that wasn't so episode oriented. This book "tells" a lot. Only a brilliant writer can get away with that and still manage to "show" you something. The time shifting is really what impressed me the most; the book has a great sense of movement. Lahiri gives us a moment by moment narrative and then sifts through months of events in a mere paragraph. She moves through years in just sentences.
2. The physical surroundings represent important ideas as well as represent what the characters are going through. Trains are a recurring location where significant things happen (Ashoke's accident; Gogol meets his first girlfriend). Gogol has an apartment in NYC that he's never in, representing his emptiness or whatever. The contrast of his 2nd girlfriend's parent's house to Gogol's parent's house represents a cultural divide. The fact that he gets married in a hotel represents the transience of his connection to his culture and of the marriage itself. And, of course there's the hotel in Ohio, although I won't give that away. This is a review not a synopsis.
3. Regarding the tense and perspective of the narrative. It is third person present tense. The present tense provides an immediacy while Lahiri at the same time manages to give the prose a meaningful voice. It is easy to lose a sense of authority without the past tense but Lahiri has a style that eloquently evades this. Third person perspective, as far as I'm concerned, is the superior form of narrative for a novel. Lahiri successfully brings us into the world of a young man and his parents. The only perspective that is lacking is that of the daughter, Sonia, Gogol's younger sister. But I think that one of the important things about the existence of the character Sonia is how she is a foil for Gogol.
4. The universal and the particular. What these character's all go through in The Namesake is the difficulty of identifying with the new world, the old one, or both. For those of us who don't have an old world to worry about identifying with, Lahiri still offers something about this experience that we can access. Read the book and find out what that is.
I give it four stars because the best is yet to come from this author.
Book Review: young Bengali discovers melting pot may be a bit too hot
Summary: 5 Stars
Some two hundred thirty years ago, an immigrant attempted to answer the vexing question his French parents had posed him: "What is an American?" His answer, famous for its clarity, ignited a debate that continues today. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur's thesis was that the American is a "new man," one who eagerly discarded the cultural traditions of his former home and just as passionately adopted the ethos of his newly adopted land, the United States. The American, de Crevecoeur, discards his former cultural heritage and completely "melts" into his new American charcter. It is the perils, costs and anguish of assimilation that Bengali author Jhumpa Lahiri explores in her brilliant debut novel, "The Namesake." Her exquisitely rendered protagonist, Gogol Ganguli, becomes the archtype for every immigrant who has wrestled with issues of conflicted identity, cultural confusion and humbling marginality.
Through Lahiri's wise and sympathetic characterization, Gogol begins his odyssey towards Americanization even before he is born. His Bengali immigrant parents, whose marriage was arranged by their adherence to cultural tradition, cannot provide a proper name for their American-born son. Their patient but unrewarded anticipation of a "good" name for their son selected by a Calcutta matriarch, results in Gogol inadvertently acquiring a "pet" name chosen by his father. This duality, between Gogol's ethnic roots and his American birthright, perpetually torments him.
Befuddlement, confusion and anger over unresolved identity occurs with dispiriting regularity across the span of Gogol's young life. Even at a traditional Bengali party celebrating his six-month-old status, the infant Gogol, "forced to confront his destiny," cannot and "with lower lip trembling," begins to cry. Ashima and Ashoke, his mother and father, wrestle as well with the burdens of adopting to a new nation. His father seems to assimilate with relative ease, but Ashima likens her immigrant status to a "sort of lifelong pregnancy...a perpetual wait, a constant burden."
As a junior high school student, Gogol loathes his name, despondent that it is "never on keychains." Conscious of his differences, he is hurt by the snickers his parents' accent evokes from store clerks. By actions conscious and unintended, Gogol immerses himself in the American melting pot. It is not an accident that by the time he is an adult, he will live in New York City, a refracted image of "How the Other Half Lives," affluent but disenchanted, externally successful but internally impoverished.
Jhumpa Lahiri seems to understand the enormous costs abandoning one's ethnic identity carry for immigrants who desire nothing more than to blend in. Her Bengali protagonist, acutely aware of his differences but unable to resolve his dual identities, comes to symbolize the anguished decisions all young immigrants must make as they carve out their paths towards becoming American. "The Namesake," in its treatment of individual growth, romantic possibilities and generational reconciliation, is an authentic masterwork.
Book Review: The typical life of an immigrant Indian family
Summary: 4 Stars
After a long time, I have finished reading a book completely. And that too - over a weekend.
I came from India as an immigrant to US 10 years back, have two kids aged 10 and 4; and I could associate myself to many experiences the author has illustrated with simple clarity and authenticiy.
* Coming to US with one suitcase in hand and accumlating lot of stuff over years - only to realize that when you are moving up from an aapartment to an independent house
* Going to beaches fully dressed - while everyone else is in swim suites
* Reluctance to buy from the yard sales
* Kids excited by the salamanders from the yard
* Having two names - one formal and one informal name; one called by the society and another called by the loved ones
* Making trips to India - trying to give an exposure to the kids - once in a year or once in two years; Packing / unpacking of 8 suitcases; Packing of the gifts to the friends and relatives in India;
* Being a lonely family at the beginning; and in a couple of years, make so many friends that you do not get a weekend free to be by yourself
* throwing the parties, get togethers where the grown-ups discuss the life, shopping, politics while the kids play video games
* celebrating all the festivals - both hindu festivals as well as thanksgiving, easter, christmas
* feeling the burden of guilt when near and dear ones pass away back in India and the helplessness of not able to be with them during thier last hours of life
Some of the experiences are hilarious and some make you nostalgic and some are gut wrenching.
Until Gogol (the main character who is born in USA at the beginning of the novel) and Sonia (a few years younger to him) are teenagers, I could connect with all the experiences Ashima and Ahoke have gone through on US soil as immigrants.
The experiences Gogol goes through in his teens and twenties - sometimes appeared to be very unfair to the parents; But that is me (the reader) wearing the hat of a first-generation parent.
While the initial chapters outlining the lives of Ahoke and Ashima are a good read (may be I could connect with their experiences very well), the later chapters of Gogol going through brief flings with a couple of girl friends and a marriage that ends in a divorce - it sounded mundane; i skimmed through some of the pages but did not feel that I missed anything.
Of all these experiences, the common theme that runs through the novel is the NAME of a person and the significance/insignificance a name has on a person. The author reflects and highlights very interesting perspectives on the NAME.
Overall, it is one of the best books I would recommend to my friends and colleagues who would be interested to know how an Indian immigrant family leads the life here in US and what changes 25 years of leading life in US would bring to a traditional Indian family.
Book Review: Stories of a life
Summary: 5 Stars
In this novel, as in the short-story collection INTERPRETER OF MALADIES, Jhumpa Lahiri continues her study of Indian immigrants to America, their attempts to retain a national identity in their new world, and their bewilderment at their own children who know no other. In particular, she maps the course of love, from the joy of discovery to the sadness of loss, a trajectory that both mirrors the experience of the immigrant and is shaped by it. The novel traces the first thirty years of Gogol Ganguli, stuck with an almost accidental given name that belongs neither to his adopted country nor to his heritage, and whose significance he only belatedly comes to understand; it is a perfect symbol of his displacement.
Lahiri describes the early experience of Gogol's parents in America in a series of relatively brief images, managing to convey their ethnic identity in such a way as to make them simply human, rather than exotic. But she succeeds best in the second half of the book, which portrays experience common to most of us, as it follows Gogol's attempts to make his own life through college and young adulthood. In particular, he passes through a series of love affairs, each helping him to new discoveries, all intensely real at the time, yet none the answer to his quest for selfhood.
While Lahiri's style is lucid and sensitive throughout, I still feel that she is more effective on the story or chapter level than with an entire novel. What made INTERPRETER OF MALADIES so magnificent was her ability to focus on a single moment or facet of a relationship, and yet to imply a longer span of heritage and possibility extending beyond the bounds of the story itself. The novel medium lets her extend this span even further, to three decades and beyond, and yet it risks losing the intense focus of her earlier work. In fact, though, she writes almost as a sequence of linked stories, skipping several years at a time then concentrating each chapter within a manageable span. At first, this makes the book seem diffuse, but once the novel gathers momentum its emotional power is extraordinary. The three chapters (8-10) dealing with Gogol's relationship with a Bengali-American woman are a masterpiece of narrative control, especially the knife-edge balance of the middle one. The author awakens the reader's empathy with both her characters, then leads it inexorably in a different direction without sacrificing either emotional logic or human sympathy. These sections, together with the appropriately quiet ending, are testament to Lahiri's miraculous ability to treat all her people with tolerance and understanding, which makes her not only a joy to read, but an even greater joy to know.