"The Namsake" is the story of an
immigrant Bengali family living in the US – the Gangulies. Ashima Ganguly gives
birth to a baby boy in 1968. Her husband Ashoke, had a scrape with death in a
train accident 7 years earlier and believes that the book he was reading – The
Overcoat by Nicolai Gogoll – was a lucky charm which saved him. They end
up naming their son Gogol, the namesake of Nikolai Gogol. This odd name turns
him into an introvert and he decides to change it to a more acceptable Nikhil.
The book takes us through Gogol’s life as he grows up, attends an Ivy-League
school, becomes a successful architect, falls in love with an American girl,
breaks up with her, marries a Bengali girl and ends up with a divorce.
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.
As a desi in America and a vilayati in India, the
perils of an American-born-Indian child is brought out beautifully in the
situations where Gogol and his sister Sonali visit Calcutta. The way Gogol
tries to distance himself from his family and his Bengali origins ought to make
you angry, but Lahiri explains his emotions in such a detailed and vivid manner
that you end up empathising with him. The difficulties that a traditional
Indian house-wife faces in a foreign land, amidst new people, new language and
new cultures is excellently portrayed through Ashima’s character.
Jhumpa Lahiri, through her lucid writing makes
Gogol and his family come alive among us, as the family next door or far off
relatives. She succeeds in painting a subtle canvas of life in “a string of
accidents, events unforeseen and unintended”, making them fluid and accessible
to the readers. Her eye for details makes the book picturesque for us to read.
'The Namesake’
undoubtedly becomes a MUST READ for every individual, irrespective of their
nationality and cultural preference. ‘The Namesake’ beautifully enacts
the lives of the Ganguly family across generations for us. The story is filled
with simplicity and confusion of the family estranged from its roots.
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.
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