The namesake ebook

If that. The end result was a feeling of being able to read this story quickly, yes, but through a thick layer of cellophane that left in its wake singular feelings of why am I bothering and its good old pal, am I supposed to care? There's another piece of terminology that writing classes love to throw around in addition to that previous standard, and that's voice.

If there was a voice in this novel, it was drowned by the endless streams of banal information attached to every inch of the plot's surface, leaving me with the slightly ill sense of watching the consumerism train wreck of typical American society without any reassurance that the author knew what they were doing.

Considering the fact that one of my biggest reasons for reading as much as I do is to find a breakdown of these popular culture standards, I was rather disappointed. Scratch that, I was very disappointed, enough to muse on whether this book, published all of nine years ago, had helped propagate those stereotypes in the first place.

Dark thoughts indeed. Finally, the literature title dropping. I suppose I should've expected it, what with the main character's name issues taking up the entirety of the novel's effort when it came to both theme and its own title, but by the end of it I was sick of seeing all those highflown phrases without a single scrip of fictional push on the author's part to live up to these influences.

Borrow a few methods of making your prose fly off the page in a churning maelstrom of creating your own beautiful song out of the best the written word has to offer?

Fine, dandy, go forth and prosper. Shoving in 'The Man Without Qualities' and Proust within the last few pages in some obtuse attempt to impress those who are in the know? Hipster, and I mean that with a vengeance. So, simply put, if you're looking to recommend me South Asian literature, please oh please grant me a work along the lines of The God of Small Things.

Cultural intersection between self and others without relying on the obvious and the physical objects? Characters that broke my heart over and over with their joy and their sorrow that I wish I could follow forevermore? You'd have to read it. It even has a literature reference, albeit in a way that pays full tribute to the work far beyond the facile typing of its signifying phrase and nothing more.

Not so much. View all 41 comments. It was originally a novel published in The New Yorker and was later expanded to a full-length novel. It explores many of the same emotional and cultural themes as her Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies. Moving between events in Calcutta, Boston, and New York City, the novel examines the nuances involved with being caught between two conflicting cultures with high The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri The Namesake is the first novel by American author Jhumpa Lahiri.

Moving between events in Calcutta, Boston, and New York City, the novel examines the nuances involved with being caught between two conflicting cultures with highly distinct religious, social, and ideological differences.

The novel describes the struggles and hardships of a Bengali couple who immigrate to the United States to form a life outside of everything they are accustomed to. View 2 comments. Nov 30, Nataliya rated it liked it Shelves: reads.

Jhumpa Lahiri's excellent mastery and command of language are amazing. She writes so effortlessly and enchantingly, in such a captivating manner and yet so matter-of-factly that her writing completely enthralls me.

Just look at one of my favorite passages - so simple and beautiful: " Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting.

You see, The Namesake flows so well that it almost easy to overlook the weak plot development and the unfortunate wasting of so much potential that this story could have had. In a nutshell, this is a story about the immigrant experience. Ashoke and Ashima are first-generation immigrants to the US from India, and they do not have the easiest time adjusting to the peculiarities of their new home and its culture. Gogol, the protagonist, is their son who is tasked with living the double life, so to speak - fitting in with the culture of his parents as well as the culture of his family's new country.

Simultaneously experiencing two cultures is not always easy, and this is the main theme of this book. And these were the bits of the story that I could relate to in a way, being a first-generation immigrant myself.

It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity of from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.

Nikolai Gogol is a great writer. Famous namesake or not, young Gogol dislikes his unusual moniker quite a bit. This is a set-up for the conflict, which, unfortunately, I felt was quite underdeveloped. You see, Lahiri takes a subtle approach without the need to hit the reader over the head with her message. The story she tells is lifelike - calm, subdued, without extra glamour added to it, without every set-up resulting in a major conflict.

But I feel that this subtlety quite often crosses the line into the lull of dullness. The story becomes almost like a diary - with much everyday filler, many simple events, many instances of telling and not showing , and not enough payoff - at least for me.

Apparently I love quick gratifications, and this book did not deliver those. I want to reiterate that my issues with this book were very easy even for me to initially disregard because of the beauty and near perfection of Lahiri writing style which makes up for many flaws.

But ultimately I felt unsatisfied with the story, and therefore I can only give it 3. That said, I already bought two other books by Lahiri and will definitely read them. She seems to be a brilliant writer, and maybe will prove to be a better storyteller in her other works. View all 23 comments. Apr 25, Candi rated it really liked it Shelves: book-i-own , contemporary-literary.

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.

Jhumpa Lahiri crafts a novel full of introspection and quiet emotion as she tells the story of the immigrant experience of one Bengali family, the Gangulis. Following an arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli move to America to begin a new life in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

While Ashoke has the distraction of a professional career, Ashima feels lost and adrift without family, friends, and the comfort of familiar surroundings. In fact, Ashima will spend decades trying to make a life for herself, trying to fit into a culture that is so alien to the one she has left behind. Upon the birth of her first child, Ashima feels so utterly alone without family by her side to support her and welcome this new baby.

She has never known of a person entering the world so alone, so deprived. But, in a sense this is a coming of age story for Gogol and perhaps the timing would not have mattered so much as his own maturing and growth. We see Gogol and his sister Sonia embracing American ways — eating Thanksgiving turkeys, preparing for Santa Claus, and coloring Easter eggs — while Ashoke and Ashima continue to expose them to the Bengali customs and celebrations.

But in changing a name can a young man really erase his heritage and begin a life ignoring the expectations of his parents, the imprint of their culture? Does he truly need to put aside one way of life in order to find complete happiness in another? Through a series of relationships and life events, Gogol does transform over time, or so I believe, but not without his share of trials and heartache.

Jhumpa Lahiri has a gift for penetrating the psyche of each of her characters. It seems there is always something a reader can relate to in each of them, in one way or another — whether likeable or not. Each character is flawed just as every human being is imperfect. The Namesake is completely relatable to anyone that has ever strived to fit in, to find an identity, to accept those around us for what they are, not what we think they should be. View all 48 comments.

Jan 09, Jibran rated it it was ok Shelves: south-asian-fiction , brouhaha. Some cultural comparisons are made as though to validate the enlightened United States at the cost of backward India. This is a familiar line in immigrant success stories: to justify their decision to migrate to the West by heaping scorn on the country or culture of their origin. But even that's not done intelligently.

It is almost in these words the comparisons are made. Well, of course. We get it. However, on the bright side, I liked the trope of public vs private names — Nikhil aka Gogol - and how Lahiri relates this private, accidental double-naming to the protagonist's larger identity crisis as an American of Indian background.

But this is also wasted and in the end you are left with a lot of impatience welling up inside you. February View all 25 comments. I read this book on several plane journeys and while hanging around several airports. I was in a hurry, not because it was a page turner but because I really needed to get to the end. And although I read it in relatively few days I still read it very very slowly.

There are a lot of words in this book. I love words. I can read words quite happily for hours as long as they don't c I read this book on several plane journeys and while hanging around several airports. I can read words quite happily for hours as long as they don't come encased in boring reports or long winded articles. I'd be very poor at reading detailed accounts of real life happenings for a court case or an insurance settlement, for example.

I imagine my eyelids would droop and my attention would wander. I'm sure that in such a situation, I'd jump at any opportunity to do something else instead. So it was wise on my part to read this book on a journey, given that I was obliged to remain in my seat and do nothing other than read. It's well known that I can't do nothing, therefore I read this book to the end. They may be fictional characters but they sound like real people, and their stories sound like an accumulation of real data.

All those trips to Calcutta - it seemed as if the reader gets a report of each and every one. On one or two occasions, Jhumpa Lahiri manages to extract an interesting gem from her accumulations - as when a bride-to-be tentatively places her foot in one of the shoes her future husband has left outside the door of the room where she is about to meet him for the first time.

We are with the girl in that pause before she turns the handle on her new life. We see her try it for size. That scene was short and perfect. Contrast it with this description of a character who enters the story for three pages and is never heard from again. He is handsome, with patrician features and swept-back, slightly greasy, light-brown hair.

What was the significance of the shirt colour, I wondered? Or him being tall, or his hair being greasy? The book is full of metaphors that appear meaningful at first glance but then you say, wait a minute, what does that really mean?

I wondered if I'd missed something significant that would have made the finish line amaze and impress me. But I couldn't bear to wade through the chapter again to find out.

In this case, the American requirement for a baby to be officially named before leaving hospital clashes with the Bengali practice of allowing the baby to remain unnamed until the matriarch of the family has decided on a name.

Soon after his very detailed birth near the beginning of the book, the main character is temporarily named Gogol by his parents because the letter containing the name chosen for him by his Bengali great grandmother hasn't yet arrived in Boston.

The 'name' issue is interesting but it's a bit of a stretch on the author's part to make it the central framework for the entire saga. Considering the connections she painstakingly makes with Nikolai Gogol, the lack of humour in her writing stands out in complete contrast to the Russian author who not only knows how to extract the essence of a situation and present it in short form, but also how to do it with underlying humour.

I don't dismiss this book about the problems of assimilation and dual identity without asking myself if the relationship Lahiri seems to have with minutiae reveals something important in her writing.

As the daughter of Bengali emigrants, I understand that she may feel a responsibility to write down the stories of people like her parents, people who arrived in the US as young emigrants and struggled to retain their own culture while trying to assimilate the new one. People who, once a spouse dies, must move between their relatives, resident everywhere and nowhere. I feel that Lahiri may have some awareness of her tendency to include too much information.

She offers a kind of run-through of the themes in the last few pages as if her book had been a textbook and we students needed to have the central arguments summed up for us.

But alongside that awareness, I wanted Lahiri to impose some writing constraints on herself. I wanted her to consider how she would write if she had only a very limited vocabulary and the simplest of grammar structures at her disposal.

But she did exactly that, I hear you shout, she went to live in Italy for two years and forced herself to read and write only in Italian! Coincidentally, I have the book that resulted from that journey though it had lain unread since I bought it some months ago. So I searched my book piles and found In Other Words and began to read it. Lahiri says at the beginning that she purposely avoided translating it herself because she feared she would alter it in the process, making it more elaborate….

She has a lot of interesting things to say about her own writing: By writing in Italian I think I am escaping both my failures with regard to English and my success.

Italian offered me a very different path. As a writer I can demolish myself, I can reconstruct myself…I am in Italian, a tougher, freer writer, who, taking root again, grows in a different way…My writing in Italian is a type of unsalted bread. It works, but the usual flavor is missing. On the other hand, I think that it does have a style, or at least a character.

The language seems like a waterfall. I don't need every drop And most interesting of all in the context of this rather long-winded review, she says: I continue, as a writer, to seek the truth, but I don't give the same weight to factual truth View all 50 comments.

Enjoyed reading about the Bengali culture, their traditions, envied their sense and closeness of family. Ashima and Ashoke, an arranged marriage, moving to the USA where Ashoke is an engineer, trying to learn a different way of life, different language, so very difficult. Ashima misses her family, and after giving birth to a son misses them even more. They name their son, Gogol, there is a reason for this name, a name he will come to disdain. Eventually the family meets other Bengalis and they b Enjoyed reading about the Bengali culture, their traditions, envied their sense and closeness of family.

Eventually the family meets other Bengalis and they become family substitutes, celebrate important cultural milestones together. This novel gave me a new understanding of just how hard it is to assimilate into a new culture. The first half of the book I remained emotionally unconnected to the characters, felt it was more tell than show.

This changed after a family tragedy which afforded an opportunity for the characters to change as well. Was impatient with Gogol and his failure to appreciate everything about his parents, his own culture but he grows within the story as does his mother.

So I ended up appreciating this book quite a bit as a cultural story and a family story. Very glad I finally read it.

Auto correct hates these names by the way, had to go back and change them three times already. View all 15 comments. This book is just not about the name given to the main character. The story is more than that. I would say this book deals more with family and relationships rather than just what it has been promoted as.

This book definitely handled well the father-son relationship that is quite realistic in the Indian society. It's rather quite accurately described the way the father and the grown-up son trying to re-establish the father-son dynamic years after.

It also described well the life of the main chara This book is just not about the name given to the main character. It also described well the life of the main character ever since he was conceived yes, the story starts with the marriage of his parents. A good start I would say! You go on knowing more about the main character as he grows up, gets involved in relationships, him getting to get to know his origin well, he struggles to know his Indian origin and identity but yes, struggle is the word.

The story also deals well in portraying how immigrants neither fit there like belonging there and being accepted where they live nor do they fit where their parents grew up. And well, that's where the writing shines!

This is one book which I get to know a character so well that he feels like he's one of my best friends who lives far away but someone I got to know well. I love the writing. I love the character development. I love how the story maintained a flow that kept me hooked till the end. I love the romance as well. However, I wasn't quite happy with the ending.

I think it's high time to reread this book. View 1 comment. Nice book on struggling with intercultural identities. I stare and stare at that sentence. I can't believe that is all I have to say about this novel. After all, this is MY topic. This is my life. My profession. My passion. How do people fit into a dominant culture if their parents come from somewhere else?

Which customs do they pick from which environment, and how do they adapt to form a crosscultural identity that works for them? How is their language affected by constant switching? Where - i Nice book on struggling with intercultural identities. Where - if at all - do they feel at home? Do they have benefits from living between two worlds, or is it a loss? All those things are contained in this Pulitzer-winning author's novel, and yet All I can say is: "It's nice.

Find something more glorious! View all 31 comments. Mar 07, Kate rated it it was ok Shelves: fiction. I liked the first 40 pages or so.

I was very interested in the scenes in India and the way the characters perceived the U. But soon I found myself losing interest. There were several problems.

One is that Lahiri's novelistic style feels more like summary "this happened, then this, then this" rather than a story I can experience through scenes. The voice was flat, and this was exacerbated by the fact that it's written in present tense. I never emotionally connected to these I liked the first 40 pages or so.

I never emotionally connected to these characters. I also got bored with the second half that focused on lots of rich, young New Yorkers sitting around drinking wine. I haven't read her two story collections, but I've heard she's a phenomenal short story writer--so I'll definitely give those a try.

Seems like some fantastic short story writers like Aimee Bender and Alice Munro are pressured to write novels when in fact they are brilliant at the story.

It's like asking a surgeon to be an attorney. View all 12 comments. Feb 12, Sara rated it it was amazing Shelves: literary-fiction , borrowed-from-library , contemporary-fiction.

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. In the absence of We first meet Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli in Calcutta, India, where they enter into an arranged marriage, just as their culture would expect.

In the absence of the letter, and at the insistence of the American hospital, they select what is meant to be a temporary name. All he knows as he grows older is that he has a name that is strange and cumbersome and unwieldy and that he wants a name that blends and reflects his world, not the world of Bengal but the world of America.

Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Great book, The Namesake pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri. The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri. Instead it was his father who did the talking, saying that the man had gone to St. College, graduating first-class-first from both institutions.

Ashima took her seat and smoothed the pleats of her sari. She sensed the mother eyeing her with approval. Ashima was five feet four inches, tall for a Bengali woman, ninety-nine pounds. Her complexion was on the dark side of fair, but she had been compared on more than one occasion to the actress Madhabi Mukherjee.

They inquired after her studies and she was asked to recite a few stanzas from The Daffodils. The father was a labor officer for the customs department of a shipping company. Ashima had never heard of Boston, or of fiber optics. She was asked whether she was willing to fly on a plane and then if she was capable of living in a city characterized by severe, snowy winters, alone. One week later the invitations were printed, and two weeks after that she was adorned and adjusted by countless aunts, countless cousins hovering around her.

These were her last moments as Ashima Bhaduri, before becoming Ashima Ganguli. Her lips were darkened, her brow and cheeks dotted with sandalwood paste, her hair wound up, bound with flowers, held in place by a hundred wire pins that would take an hour to remove once the wedding was finally over. Her head was draped with scarlet netting. She wore all the necklaces and chokers and bracelets that were destined to live most of their lives in an extra-large safety deposit box in a bank vault in New England.

At the designated hour she was seated on a piri that her father had decorated, hoisted five feet off the ground, carried out to meet the groom. She had hidden her face with a heart-shaped betel leaf, kept her head bent low until she had circled him seven times.

Eight thousand miles away in Cambridge, she has come to know him. In the evenings she cooks for him, hoping to please, with the unrationed, remarkably unblemished sugar, flour, rice, and salt she had written about to her mother in her very first letter home.

By now she has learned that her husband likes his food on the salty side, that his favorite thing about lamb curry is the potatoes, and that he likes to finish his dinner with a small final helping of rice and dal.

At night, lying beside her in bed, he listens to her describe the events of her day: her walks along Massachusetts Avenue, the shops she visits, the Hare Krishnas who pester her with their leaflets, the pistachio ice cream cones she treats herself to in Harvard Square.

On Sundays he spends an hour occupied with his tins of shoe polishes and his three pairs of shoes, two black and one brown. It is a moment that shocks her still, and that she prefers, in spite of all she tells him at night about the life they now share, to keep to herself. On another floor of the hospital, in a waiting room, Ashoke hunches over a Boston Globe from a month ago, abandoned on a neighboring chair.

He reads about the riots that took place during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and about Dr. Benjamin Spock, the baby doctor, being sentenced to two years in jail for threatening to counsel draft evaders. The Favre Leuba strapped to his wrist is running six minutes ahead of the large gray-faced clock on the wall.

It is four-thirty in the morning. Ashima was fully dilated and being taken to the delivery room, the person on the other end had said. Upon arrival at the hospital he was told that she was pushing, that it could be any minute now.

Any minute. To prove himself right he had taken a sip of the sweet liquid from her cup, but she had insisted on its bitterness, and poured it down the sink. That was the first thing that had caused her to suspect, and then the doctor had confirmed it, and then he would wake to the sounds, every morning when she went to brush her teeth, of her retching. Before he left for the university he would leave a cup of tea by the side of the bed, where she lay listless and silent.

Often, returning in the evenings, he would find her still lying there, the tea untouched. He now desperately needs a cup of tea for himself, not having managed to make one before leaving the house. But the machine in the corridor dispenses only coffee, tepid at best, in paper cups. He takes off his thick-rimmed glasses, fitted by a Calcutta optometrist, polishes the lenses with the cotton handkerchief he always keeps in his pocket, A for Ashoke embroidered by his mother in light blue thread.

His black hair, normally combed back neatly from his forehead, is disheveled, sections of it on end. He stands and begins pacing as the other expectant fathers do. So far, the door to the waiting room has opened twice, and a nurse has announced that one of them has a boy or a girl. There are handshakes all around, pats on the back, before the father is escorted away. The men wait with cigars, flowers, address books, bottles of champagne. They smoke cigarettes, dropping ashes onto the floor.

Ashoke is indifferent to such indulgences. He neither smokes nor drinks alcohol of any kind. Ashima is the one who keeps all their addresses, in a small notebook she carries in her purse. It has never occurred to him to buy his wife flowers. He returns to the Globe, still pacing as he reads.

Nothing roused him. Nothing distracted him. Nothing caused him to stumble. As a teenager he had gone through all of Dickens. He read newer authors as well, Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, all purchased from his favorite stall on College Street with pujo money. But most of all he loved the Russians. His paternal grandfather, a former professor of European literature at Calcutta University, had read from them aloud in English translations when Ashoke was a boy. For that hour Ashoke was deaf and blind to the world around him.

He did not hear his brothers and sisters laughing on the rooftop, or see the tiny, dusty, cluttered room in which his grandfather read. Read all the Russians, and then reread them, his grandfather had said. They will never fail you.

That he would be reading a book the moment he died. One day, in the earliest hours of October 20, , this nearly happened. Ashoke was twenty-two, a student at B. Ashoke had never spent the holidays away from his family.

Ashoke accepted the invitation eagerly. He carried two suitcases, the first one containing clothes and gifts, the second empty. For it would be on this visit, his grandfather had said, that the books in his glass-fronted case, collected over a lifetime and preserved under lock and key, would be given to Ashoke.

The books had been promised to Ashoke throughout his childhood, and for as long as he could remember he had coveted them more than anything else in the world. He had already received a few in recent years, given to him on birthdays and other special occasions.

But now that the day had come to inherit the rest, a day his grandfather could no longer read the books himself, Ashoke was saddened, and as he placed the empty suitcase under his seat, he was disconcerted by its weightlessness, regretful of the circumstances that would cause it, upon his return, to be full. His favorite story in the book was the last, The Overcoat, and that was the one Ashoke had begun to reread as the train pulled out of Howrah Station late in the evening with a prolonged and deafening shriek, away from his parents and his six younger brothers and sisters, all of whom had come to see him off and had huddled until the last moment by the window, waving to him from the long dusky platform.

He had read The Overcoat too many times to count, certain sentences and phrases embedded in his memory. Each time he was captivated by the absurd, tragic, yet oddly inspiring story of Akaky Akakyevich, the impoverished main character who spends his life meekly copying documents written by others and suffering the ridicule of absolutely everyone. His mouth watered at the cold veal and cream pastries and champagne Akaky consumed the night his precious coat was stolen, in spite of the fact that Ashoke had never tasted these things himself.

In some ways the story made less sense each time he read it, the scenes he pictured so vividly, and absorbed so fully, growing more elusive and profound. Outside the view turned quickly black, the scattered lights of Howrah giving way to nothing at all.

He had a second-class sleeper in the seventh bogie, behind the air-conditioned coach. Because of the season, the train was especially crowded, especially raucous, filled with families on holiday. Small children were wearing their best clothing, the girls with. Open navigation menu. Close suggestions Search Search. User Settings. Skip carousel. Carousel Previous. Carousel Next. What is Scribd? Explore Ebooks.

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Released: Sep 1, ISBN: Format: Book. Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world??

An intimate, closely observed family portrait. The New York Times "Hugely appealing. People Magazine "An exquisitely detailed family saga.

Entertainment Weekly. Literary Fiction. About the author. Read more. Related Books. Related categories Skip carousel. Description: Second Mariner Books edition. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, For Alberto and Octavio, whom I call by other names The reader should realize himself that it could not have happened otherwise, and that to give him any other name was quite out of the question.

Yes, all right, Ashima says. You can. Squeeze my hand. Squeeze as tight as you like. Start your free 30 days. Reviews What people think about The Namesake 4. Rate as 1 out of 5, I didn't like it at all. Rate as 2 out of 5, I didn't like it that much. Rate as 3 out of 5, I thought it was OK. Rate as 4 out of 5, I liked it. Rate as 5 out of 5, I loved it. Rating: 0 out of 5 stars.

Write a review optional. Reader reviews kshaffar. I found the beginning of this book very slow. It kept my interest though, and the Ganguli's story was riveting. The heartbreak of the immigrant experience, coming from such a "foreign" place was beautifully wrought and the hard time that many children of immigrants have with identity was touching and easily accessible.

Though the level of detail allowed for a remarkably vivid story, I often felt bogged down in the detail. Still, I whole heartedly recommend.

I did enjoy this book fairly well. There was not a lot of character development and I felt it was a little bit like reading a narrative of someone's life looking from the outside in.

The author is a beautiful writer however, which is the saving grace of this book. Digital audiobook performed by Sarita Choudhury.