Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies established this
young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. 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.
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, 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.
