The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
A review of The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri.
“You are still young, free.. Do yourself a favor. Before it’s too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.”
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (2004). Published by Mariner Books.
I found this particular copy of The Namesake in a bin at my local Saver’s, a thrift chain that tends to have more curated book sections (I tend to swear upon their history and biography book sections). This was well over a year ago, before I became tightly interweaved with the world of Bengali culture and its significance, and well before I started pondering similar themes that this novel touches upon in my own work.
It was in the middle of my Bengali program, literally on the day we had off from Bangla classes, that I picked up this novel and was absolutely amazed.
Suddenly, everything I was learning about was coming to life on the page, the culture and the language, and I finally got to see it in a different context: the Bengali-American experience.
I find diaspora literature fascinating, but this novel takes it in a level that is a step down from Pachinko, but I found that it works better than Pachinko in my taste. My frustration with Pachinko was that it followed too many characters; here, we stay central to the mother, father, and their son, Gogol/Nikhil.
I’m already scraping the surface here, so let’s dive into this review.
Book Blurb
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.
Content / Writing
The beginning of this novel starts with focusing on the matriarch of the family, Ashima. She has just been placed into an arranged marriage with Ashoke, a fellow Bengali who is studying abroad to get his PhD at MIT. Ashima was born and raised in Calcutta (aka Kolkata), and has never left India before.
Stricken with the grief of leaving home, she searches for bits of the India she left behind in everything that she does. She wears her sari in public, wears a bindi, and, when Ashoke and her have two children, they continue Hindu Bengali traditions and attempt to raise their kids as Bengalis.
We shift to Ashoke, the patriarch of the family, for a bit on his tragic backstory. At twenty-two, when going to visit his blind grandfather, the train he’s on crashes, killing hundreds and almost Ashoke himself. By some miracle, he manages to be pulled out of the rubble and cannot move for a year as his broken bones come back together. He was reading Gogol, the Russian writer at the time, which then inspires him to name his name after the writer, leading to a series of complicated events that follows for the rest of the novel.
This is a novel largely about Diaspora identity and what we leave behind when we go somewhere else. The matriarch and patriarch of the novel, the Ganguli parents, leave behind the Kolkata they know and get calls about when bad news arrive, like the death of their parents.
They start a new Bengali community in Massachusetts, where Ashoke teaches, in order to pave a sense of community for themselves in a country where they feel alienated. But, as the novel shifts to Gogol’s perspective, we see something completely different.
Gogol and Sonia, the children, reject the traditional Bengali identity. They don’t read or write Bangla, they date white people while in college, and they both move away from home. While their parents are yearning for remnants of Kolkatan and Bengali identity, their children flee as far away from it as they can, thus losing a part of themselves and their ancestries in the process.
The writing itself is good, but extremely repetitive in nature. I noticed Lahiri reusing the same structure for a lot of her sentences, which is a very nitpicky writer thing, but it started throwing me off as a reader. It didn’t affect my pace of reading; I read this novel in two hours straight, including the phrases I highlighted and sat upon along the way, which shows that it wasn’t a tough read for me personally.
Overall Thoughts
All in all, it’s a good read. It’s a family story and a classic diaspora tale, especially in the United States, that many children of immigrants can relate to, regardless of whether they are Indian, Bengali, or a completely different ethnicity. As an Iranian-American, I could relate to Gogol’s struggle with his name and how he wanted to get as far away from the culture as he could, because he felt smothered in it.
This book is also a good primer into American diaspora literature, with explanations about the culture (e.g. instead of just saying “bhalo nam,” which literally translates to “good name,” Lahiri just calls it bhalo nam once and then refers to it as a good name throughout the novel. I do understand that this novel is a product of its time (e.g. it explains all the culture for a Western audience), but I wish it cranked it up more.
