Jhumpa lahiri the namesake book review

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri Published by Mariner Books. 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.

Famous books of jhumpa lahiri

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.

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. 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.

Themes in the namesake by jhumpa lahiri

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.