num_pages: 9
description: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations.The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along a ﬁrst-generation path strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.
language: English
title: The Namesake
titlecomplete: The Namesake
characters: Maxine, Sonia/Sonali Ganguli, Moushumi Mazoomdar, Ashima Ganguli, Ashoke Ganguli, Gogol/Nikhil Ganguli
genres: Fiction, Indian Literature, Book Club, India, Literature, Adult, Novels, Contemporary, Adult Fiction, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 264846
places: Cambridge, Massachusetts
awards: awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: Orange Prize
category: Fiction Longlist, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Fiction
publisher: Random House Audio