The Namesake: A Novel
by Lahiri, Jhumpa
- Used
- very good
- Paperback
- Condition
- Very Good/Wraps
- ISBN 10
- 0007173032
- ISBN 13
- 9780007173037
- Seller
-
LEXINGTON, Massachusetts, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Synopsis
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.
Reviews
Delightful and moving, this story of an Americanized Indian man nicknamed "Gogol" after Nikolai Gogol is thoughtful and extremely entertaining. Lahiri is a prizewinner not to be missed.
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Details
- Seller
- George Cross Books (US)
- Seller's Inventory #
- 31663
- Title
- The Namesake: A Novel
- Author
- Lahiri, Jhumpa
- Format/Binding
- Paperback
- Book Condition
- Used - Very Good
- Jacket Condition
- Wraps
- Edition
- Book Club edition
- ISBN 10
- 0007173032
- ISBN 13
- 9780007173037
- Publisher
- Houghton Miflin
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 2003
- Pages
- 291
Terms of Sale
George Cross Books
About the Seller
George Cross Books
About George Cross Books
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Trade Paperback
- Used to indicate any paperback book that is larger than a mass-market paperback and is often more similar in size to a hardcover...
- Book Club Edition
- A generic term denoting a book which was produced or distributed by one of any number of book club organizations. Usually the...
- Tight
- Used to mean that the binding of a book has not been overly loosened by frequent use.
- Edges
- The collective of the top, fore and bottom edges of the text block of the book, being that part of the edges of the pages of a...