Given that [The Namesake] was my first novel [her debut was the Pulizer-winning short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies] the process of writing of it was itself new, confusing, at times bewildering. I was learning how to dilate a short story into a novel, and I had the feeling of scraping at life, scraping at my past in order to imbue the story with essence. The book was written by a young person, a young artist. The language, though English, feels composed in an alternate rhythm, in a cadence I've since abandoned. Like Ashima's hair on her wedding day, the prose, from my current perspective, is a bit unruly, refusing to "lie flat." Some of the scenes still feel true to me, emotionally. Other parts feel more obviously constructed. I was trying to grab hold of a part of life that was passing rapidly, that had already passed in great part. I was trying to better understand the frame of mind of the two people who had raised me. The driving impulse, back then, was to layer in details, as many and as specific as possible. What I continue to appreciate about the book are the interior states of mind, certain observations. In order to grow and change as a writer, I have slowly distanced myself from the rest.
The Namesake's great themes are change and becoming, inventing, adapting. assimilating, adjusting to new states of being. It is about how life's direction can be interrupted. It is about wanting to be something other than oneself. Given these basic themes, it resembles all my other books. The battle with myself, my origins, my place in the world, goes on. New identities, languages, and settings have been incorporated, former habits and passions have made space for others. Were I to stop fully waging this battle, I would cease to know myself, and my quess is that I would stop writing.
I am now, stylistically, quite far from The Namesake. I write in a phase of concentration, of distillation, with the aim to drain away cultural specificity, to limit details, to speak more abstractly of the places and things and customs that represent who we are. The novel I have recently published, along with all the rest of my writing in ltalian thus far, dispenses with the use of names altogether. Having said this. I am still examining the same basic questions of place and belonging, only through a different lens. My characters these davs are individuals with only vaguely identifiable backgrounds, They dwell in nameless cities. And yet they, too, struggle with who they are.
Jhumpa Lahiri, afterword to 15th anniversary edition of The Namesake, 2018
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