TITLE: The NamesakeAUTHOR: Jhumpa Lahiri
STARTED: September 24, 2009
FINISHED: October 4, 2009
PAGES: 304
GENRE: Fiction
FIRST SENTENCE: On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of her Central Square apartment, combing Rice Crispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl.
SUMMARY: [From barnesandnoble.com] 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 the book received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year, 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 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. 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.
THOUGHTS: I still don't know what to make of this book. My book club met last night and we discussed The Namesake and, even then, I still don't know how I feel. Nothing terribly good or terribly bad jumps out at me. Also, nothing about this books screams about it being mediocre or a middling text. I enjoyed reading it, but only in the way that one likes a book while they are reading it and sees no reason to put it down.
The pacing of this text is very deliberate. There are long pauses and the story moves slowly, but I never felt like I had to slog through the work. In some ways, it felt like I was reading a British play or movie. Something about it just said to me that the work moved at a set pace and I should be happy.
Also, the text felt very passive. The characters just let things happen, they never seem to act. Gogol is the subject of the story and he seems inert. There are no real dramatic upswings in the story even when emotional and life changing events are occurring.
Only one scene sticks out in my mind. In that scene Gogol is dealing with a death in the family, and I cried. My grandmother passed away earlier this year and something about the emotion in that particular part of the book touched me. So, I cried. At the same time, I knew my tears were more about me than they were connected to the book.
I guess, in the end, it's hard to feel a connection one way or another with a book when the characters therein do not connect with each other. They felt like set pieces, not communicative and emotional human beings.
RATING: 5/10 [Meh.]
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