by Jhumpa Lahiri
(291 pages)
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.
(from Amazon.com)
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