The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri
Newlyweds Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli are leaving their home in Calcutta to move to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their son, nicknamed Gogol after the Russian writer, will grow up never fully belonging to either world.
I mostly read sci-fi, and I’ve got a childish bias against literary fiction: something about how characters are rarely perfectly happy at the end, how it’s a mundane sort of unhappiness that could happen to anyone, has always bothered me a little bit. This book has the same sort of ending: not so much bittersweet as it is mundane. Gogol and Ashima live ordinary lives, which we follow, and then we don’t anymore.
Regardless of this, I did love this book. It’s half because of Lahiri’s careful, specific prose, and half from the depth of character she gives her mains, extraordinary in so short a book.
My mother loves her South Asian immigrant stories, so I’ve read several and I’ll probably read several more. This one doesn’t leave the formula much, but it’s one of the finest examples of it I’ve ever read.
Plot: winding. Like life, Lahiri doesn’t bother much with foreshadowing or three-act structure: it progresses steadily and the twists are unexpected in the same way they are in life. The only thing tying it together is that theme of Nikolai Gogol, whose works changed Ashoke’s life and whose name haunts Gogol his whole life. I loved seeing that theme weave its way in and out of the story, to come full circle at the end.
Characters: excellent. They’re carefully realized people, flawed and loveable. Lahiri’s narrators are charismatic, and even when I didn’t like them I wanted to hear more about them. She’s got a gift for specific little gestures and turns of phrase that bring people to life, and I love how we see characters though various eyes and perspectives.
Setting: beautiful and detailed. So much of this book is summary: paragraphs of the ordinary parts of living, of journeys and schoolwork and the places we live. Lahiri pays more attention to them than perhaps any other author I’ve read, until Cambridge and Calcutta and their house in the suburbs are as much members of the story as Gogol’s love interests.
Prose: specific and unique. There’s an interesting narrative voice going on here: it’s removed a certain amount from the characters, and doubles back on itself to explain some things, never addressing the audience directly but sort of halfway-aware of them anyways. Here’s an example from page 2: “When she calls out to Ashoke, she doesn’t say his name. Ashima never thinks of her husband’s name when she things of her husband, even though she knows perfectly well what it is. She has adopted his surname but refuses, for propriety’s sake, to utter his first. It’s not the type of thing that Bengali wives do. Like a kiss or caress in a Hindi movie, a husband’s name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over. And so, instead of saying Ashoke’s name she utters the interrogative that has come to replace it, which translates roughly as, “Are you listening to me?”” I read this and was hooked - my grandmother does the exact same thing, down to the ‘me kya ji’ Ashima uses instead.
Diversity rating: most prominent characters are Bengali. Well-written women.
