The Namesake

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While what Lahiri's characters' experience can be occasionally comic, she never makes them into a 'joke'. In fact, she reserves judgment, and each character, regardless of their actions, is portrayed with compassion. Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Change, and its Dependence on Stability I think part of the reason I connected so much with this book is because my best friend from college was an immigrant at age 6 from India. Her parents are traditional in a country that is completely different than theirs. They would like their daughters to end up with a man from India. However, they live in a city with only 80 Indian people total. When you takeaway all the children, parents and non-single men that doesn't leave much choice. While reading this book I kept thinking of her.

In Chapters 3 and 4, Gogol grows up as a Bengali American child with a name that is neither Bengali nor American. Although his parents decide to give him the formal Bengali name “Nikhil” when he begins kindergarten, Gogol refuses to respond to the name so his school teachers call him by his legal name, “Gogol.” Gogol’s younger sister is born, a girl named Sonali and called “Sonia.” Although Ashoke and Ashima try to raise their children according to Bengali cultural practices, they often find themselves competing with Gogol and Sonia’s desires to live like their American friends. Anni dopo Ashoke emigra negli Stati Uniti. E quando gli nasce il primo figlio, gli sembra giusto e naturale chiamarlo come lo scrittore russo che gli ha salvato la vita: Gogol. an aimless academic, and Moushumi’s illicit lover. Dimitri met Moushumi when she was in high school and he was applying to PhD programs. Moushumi finds Dimitri’s information by change, and they begin an affair. Moushumi knows that her tryst with Dimitri is wrong, and that he is something of a slob and a dilettante. But this does not keep her from the affair. Gerald and Lydia Ratliff The Namesake (2006): When Cultures Clash". Movierdo. 15 February 2020. Archived from the original on 25 June 2023 . Retrieved 12 July 2020.As Lahiri recounts the story of this family, she also interrogates concepts of cultural identity, of dislocation and rootlessness, of cultural and generational divides, and of tradition and familial expectation. As the title of the novel suggests, The Namesake focuses on Gogol’s fraught relationship with his own name. As the American-born son of Bengali parents, Gogol struggles to reconcile himself with his Russian name. His uncommon name comes to symbolise his own self-divide and reticence to embrace his parents’ culture. There isn't an elaborate plot other than that life happens. We touch base with Gogol going to college (Yale), having his first romantic and then sexual experiences, breaking up, getting a job. When Gogol goes to Yale it's 1982, so we learn about his first adventures with girls, alcohol and pot.

Gogol studies architecture at Yale and then works as an architect in New York. He has three relationships, the first with Ruth, the second with Maxine and then he marries Moushumi. Gogol and Moushumi have always distanced themselves from their Indian roots, rejecting any plans to marry within their race. When they unexpectedly hit it off on their first meeting, they feel happy that they are ''fulfilling a collective, deep-seated desire'' on the part of their families. The love story of Gogol with each of the girls is beautifully described complete with how they meet, what draws them together, moments of love and passion and finally, heartbreak and disconnection.

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The story begins as Ashok and Ashima Ganguli, a young Bengali couple, leave Calcutta, India, and settle in Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ashok is an engineering student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Ashima struggles through language and cultural barriers as well as her own fears as she delivers her first child alone. Had the delivery taken place in Calcutta, she would have had the baby at home, surrounded by family. The delivery is successful, but the new parents learn they cannot leave the hospital before giving their son a legal name. We first meet Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli in Calcutta, India, where they enter into an arranged marriage, just as their culture would expect. Ashoke is a professor in the United States and takes his bride to this foreign country where they try to assimilate into American life, while still maintaining their distinctly Bengali identities. When their first child is born, a son, they are awaiting a letter from Ashima’s grandmother telling them his name, which she is to have selected. In the absence of the letter, and at the insistence of the American hospital, they select what is meant to be a temporary name. The name of Ashoke’s favorite author, the Russian Gogol. Library Journal describes the novel as, “this poignant treatment of the immigrant experience, which is a rich, stimulating fusion of authentic emotion, ironic observation, and revealing details.” Booklist review says, “Lahiri's deeply knowing, avidly descriptive, and luxuriously paced first novel is equally triumphant as Interpreter of Maladies”

Chapters 1 and 2 narrate the story of the Gangulis’ early days in America. Ashoke decided to move to Boston and begin graduate school after barely surviving a catastrophic train accident in India. A few years later, his parents and Ashima’s parents arranged their marriage, and Ashima left Calcutta to join Ashoke in Boston. As the novel begins, the two of them are going to a Boston hospital because Ashima is in labor with their first child. Why Rani, Abhishek lost out on Namesake". Rediff.com Movies. 23 March 2007. Archived from the original on 15 July 2011 . Retrieved 12 March 2011. This book tells a story which must be familiar to anyone who has migrated to another country - the fact that having made the transition to a new culture you are left missing the old and never quite achieving full admittance into the new. In fact a feeling of never quite belonging to either. He wonders how his parents had done it, leaving their respective families behind, seeing them so seldom, dwelling unconnected, in a perpetual state of expectation, of longing.” The different love scenes were captivating. Gogol dated women I saw clearly, women to whom I could attach the names of friends. He became immersed in the literary and art world through Maxine and her parents, where he learned to relax and enjoy the art of living. He became immersed in the world of language with Moushumi, a woman who was interested in French literature and in finding her own way, her own customs; a woman who wanted to read, travel, study in France, entertain friends, explore meaning through the written word; a woman I could relate to.

Adam Bede

Ashoke is an introvert and as much as he loves his family, he is not expressive and does not reveal to Gogol the significant story behind his name until much later. As soon as Gogol turns eighteen, he changes his name to Nikhil and immediately feels liberated like a newer and freer person who has shed the weight of his old life.

Gogol's agony is not so much about being born to Indian parents, as much as being saddled with a name that seems to convey nothing, in a way accentuating his feeling of "not really belonging to anything" It was originally a novel published in The New Yorker and was later expanded to a full-length novel. Pause, Arun Kale, code fixes and updates by Stef. "Nirali Magazine - 21 Things You Didn't Know About The Namesake". niralimagazine.com. Archived from the original on 7 October 2017 . Retrieved 3 October 2016. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link) urn:oclc:717150522 Scandate 20111122034933 Scanner scribe20.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Usl_hit auto Worldcat (source edition)He hates that his name is both absurd and obscure, that it has nothing to do with who he is, that it is neither Indian nor American but of all things Russian. He hates having to live with it, with a pet name turned good name, day after day, second after second… At times his name, an entity shapeless and weightless, manages nevertheless to distress him physically, like the scratchy tag of a shirt he has been forced permanently to wear." At first, it appears that The Namesake is a novel “about” the Bengali-American experience. Of course, Ashima and Ashoke feel out of place when they move to Cambridge. And Ashima feels again out of place when the family relocates to the suburbs of Boston, just as Ashima was becoming accustomed to her Cambridge neighborhood. But, by the end of the novel, it becomes clear that Lahiri’s point is much larger. It is not that Bengalis experience a feeling of “outsider-ness” when they come to America. It is that America is a country of “being outside,” of different groups and communities, some overlapping, others quite removed from one another.