Un nino de padres bengalies, nacionalidad estadounidense y nombre ruso en busca de un lugar, una voz y un nombre.

La primera novela de la aclamada autora de El interprete del dolor.

Tras la lenta recuperacion de un terrible accidente ferroviario y un matrimonio arreglado con la joven Ashima, Ashoke Ganguli decide abandonar su comoda y previsible existencia en Calcuta, aceptar una beca en el Instituto Tecnologico de Massachusetts y mudarse con su esposa a Boston. Alli nacera su primer hijo, que por azares del destino acabara llevando por nombre Gogol en honor al celebre escritor ruso. El nino, hijo de bengalies, ciudadano estadounidense y de nombre ruso, crecera entre korma y hamburguesas, musica de los Beatles y clases de bengali, viajes a Calcuta, donde a el y a su hermana se los considera extranjeros, y ritos hindues celebrados en suelo estadounidense; pero, sobre todo, crecera extranado y perplejo ante su propio nombre.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

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.