The Book: The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Story: The story begins with young newlyweds Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli who have just immigrated from India starting a new life in America.  They set up house in a suburb of Boston and go to school and just begin to get acclimated to American culture.  They are not married long when they have their first son, Gogol.  They name him after a Russian author that Ashoke admires while waiting for his “real” name to be sent from family in India.  The name never arrives and the boy is Gogol from then on.

The story follows Gogol through his childhood and adolescence, just trying to strike a balance between the very Indian life that his family leads at home and the life that he sees all around him in his friends homes.  As he grows older and starts going out on his own, he has to make some real decisions about who he is and how he will allow his culture to define him.  For Gogol, a lot of this comes back to the fact that he has a name that no one has ever heard from a country that is not even his own.  He never really feels “at home” in his name, and that is a large focus of the book at times.

The last half of the book is taken by Gogol’s relationships with women.  His family want him, obviously, to find an Indian girl that is part of their circle and marry in the traditional Indian way.  While he’s at school, however, Gogol dates several women who are far, far from that mold.  When his father passes away unexpectedly, he is once again immersed in the culture he grew up in and finds that he has to make a decision about how he is going to live the rest of his life.

What I Thought: For some reason I’ve read a lot of immigration stories over the last year.  I’m not really sure why I’m drawn to them, but I think it’s kind of fascinating to see America from an outsider’s perspective.

To be perfectly honest, as far as the feelings/emotions/observations part of the immigration story, Jhumpa Lahiri really added very little to the conversation.  Because her story covered such a long time period (1968 thru 1999) and covered the lives of two full generations, all in under 300 pages, there really wasn’t a deep look into the immigration experience and what it looks like specifically to Indians.  But as far as adding a beautifully written piece? She did her job.  The prose was simple and everything was pretty understated, but she pulled it off really well.  I was hooked in from page one and I know that the main reason for that is that her words and her flow were just delicious.

I think that where she went with Gogol was kind of beyond just the basic immigration story.  She really dove into the experience of finding out who you are separate from your parents, from your culture, and from the expectations people put on you.  Gogol was pushed from a lot of different directions, just like any American teenager, and it took him a lot of thought and a lot of character-changes to really lock into who he was and start living that.  That is not just an immigration story.  That is a universal coming of age story and I really think that that is why this book was so successful.

It says on the cover that Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer for her short story collection about similar topics, and you guys know how I feel about short stories.  I have a library trip planned for tonight and you better believe that this one is coming home with me!

Conclusion: While this kind of is just another immigration story, for me it was a lot more than that. It was beautifully written and I would recommend it to anyone.  Read this!