The Namesake

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003. Second printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Philippe Lardy (Jacket illustration), and Marion E. [10], 291, [3] pages. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Inscription reads For Julia--a dear friend. Jhumpa Lahiri. Price blacked out on DJ flap. 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. 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. 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 marriage, 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 a first-generation path strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. She reveals the power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also how we define ourselves. Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri (born July 11, 1967) is an American author known for her short stories, novels and essays. Her debut collection of short-stories Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her first novel, The Namesake, was adapted into the popular film of the same name. Her first novel, "The Namesake", was a New York Times Notable Book, and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Unaccustomed Earth won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, while her second novel, The Lowland, was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. On January 22, 2015, Lahiri won the USD 50,000 DSC Prize for Literature for The Lowland. In these works, Lahiri explored the Indian-immigrant experience in America. In 2014, Lahiri was awarded the National Humanities Medal. She has been a professor of creative writing at Princeton University since 2015. Derived from an article in Publishers Weekly: One of the most anticipated books of the year, Lahiri's first novel begins when newlyweds Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli emigrate to Cambridge, Mass., in 1968, where Ashima immediately gives birth to a son, Gogol—a pet name that becomes permanent when his formal name, traditionally bestowed by the maternal grandmother, is posted in a letter from India, but lost in transit. Ashoke becomes a professor of engineering, but Ashima has a harder time assimilating, unwilling to give up her ties to India. A leap ahead to the '80s finds the teenage Gogol ashamed of his Indian heritage and his unusual name, which he sheds as he moves on to college at Yale and graduate school at Columbia, legally changing it to Nikhil. In one of the most telling chapters, Gogol moves into the home of a family of wealthy Manhattan WASPs and is initiated into a lifestyle idealized in Ralph Lauren ads. Here, Lahiri demonstrates her considerable powers of perception and her ability to convey the discomfort of feeling "other" in a world many would aspire to inhabit. After the death of Gogol's father interrupts this interlude, Lahiri again jumps ahead a year, quickly moving Gogol into marriage, divorce and a role as a dutiful if a bit guilt-stricken son. Lahiri offers a number of beautiful and moving tableaus.