The Namesake
by Lahiri, Jhumpa
- Used
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- See description
- Seller
-
Woodland Hills, California, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 2003. First Edition ~1st Printing. Hardcover. Pulitzer Prize winning author's first novel and basis for the 2006 film of the same name; fine in fine dust jacket, in fresh mylar cover; very gentle wear to textblock edges else a crisp square unmarked copy in unclipped dust jacket; clean and tight with complete number line on copyright page
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
On Aug 11 2005, Raabe said:
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
- Bookseller
- David Kaye Books & Memorabilia
(US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 27561
- Title
- The Namesake
- Author
- Lahiri, Jhumpa
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- Used
- Edition
- First Edition ~1st Printing
- Publisher
- Houghton Mifflin Co
- Place of Publication
- Boston
- Date Published
- 2003
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About the Seller
David Kaye Books & Memorabilia
Biblio member since 2005
Woodland Hills, California
About David Kaye Books & Memorabilia
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- Copyright page
- The page in a book that describes the lineage of that book, typically including the book's author, publisher, date of...
- Fine
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- 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...
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- Jacket
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- Tight
- Used to mean that the binding of a book has not been overly loosened by frequent use.
- First Edition
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- Number Line
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