Book Review
By P.A. MacLean
RedwoodAge.com
The pressure to conform to familial expectations weighs on
everyone, whether from Calcutta or Boston.
The story of romantic love and how we find it and struggle to keep it
forms the core of The Namesake. Intertwined
is the more poignant search for love and understanding between father and son
that chugs through the background of this novel, animating it and giving it
texture.
The first novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, after her Pulitzer
Prize-winning collection of short stories, “Interpreter of Maladies,” takes
us on a journey of assimilation that spans two generations.
It is also two love stories, one of an arranged marriage
between an Indian academic and his wife, both from Calcutta, and the other his
son. The story explores the son’s
American search for love while straddling two cultures.
The father, Ashoke, nearly dies in a train wreck in India
but is rescued when his hand is spotted in the debris clutching a volume of
Nikolai Gogol’s short stories. Ashoke
survives and eventually goes to America to study at MIT, bringing a wife. Ashima,
selected for him by family.
Lahiri tells us of the Bengali tradition of a grandmother
providing the name for the first child, but in this case the letter containing
the name goes astray between Calcutta and Boston. And the old lady dies before they can discover what the name
was to be
The couple name their son Gogol Ganguli in remembrance of
the Russian writer who saved Ashoke’s life in the train accident.
Gogol grows up an American at the center of a Bengali community whose
traditions he doesn’t understand and tries to push aside.
The initial story of Ashoke and his wife’s life and
loneliness in America, far from the tight-knit extended families in Calcutta, is
one of outsiders surviving in a strange land.
By contrast, Gogol’s story of the assimilated life, that still finds
him an outsider, portrays his search for self in two worlds.
Gogol attends Yale, becomes an architect and dates a
Manhattan woman from a wealthy cultured family that understands little of him or
his life. The relationship fails
and Gogol finds himself set up on a blind date by with the daughter of a Bengali
friend of his mother’s. The two had rejected their heritage but both find they
can’t escape the transplanted traditions and culture that has enveloped them
all their lives.
Lahiri captures guilt, longing, tragedy and hope in this exquisitely told story of family and of love.
