Add your review
Avg. Rating: 4
Mega tear jerker... A lot of hype and did NOT disappoint!
Finally got around to reading it and wasn't disappointed. First generation immigrants beware! Lump in my throat started midway thru the book and couldn't stop weeping for the last quarter. Had to call my parents as soon as it was over to tell them I loved them... Yeah, it's that kind of book. No need for me to go over the plot since it's been hashed over many times. Something about Jhumpa Lahiri's style of writing. It's languid, evocative, and very very real.
Just blah
I had high expectations for this book, but it was just blah. It's superficial, with no insight behind it. The author seemed to spend more time dreaming up outfits for her characters than substance for their personalities. I'm sorry to say this book was kind of a waste of time; it's the kind of writing you might appreciate to have, in a magazine, while you're waiting at the dentist's office...not something you'd like to see dragged out into a whole novel and paraded as literature. Blah.
Highly recommended
I thought this book was absolutely beautiful, one of the few books of recent vintage that I've read over and over again. It is also a pretty quick read, easy to finish in just a few long sittings.
I especially loved the parts of the story that drive home how difficult it is to live in a foreign country, as told through the eyes of the parents. Lahiri is able to make this point without being explicit, preachy, or forceful. And although the book will be the most explicitly relevant to the children of Indian immigrants, it finds a much wider audience not only among all second-gen Americans, but also among those who feel torn between their parents' lives and their own. I am in the latter group, and I was fascinated to read how Gogol navigates between the world he grew up in and the one creates for himself as an adult. Of course, finding a mixture between the two is the ultimate goal.
Not as good as her first effort...
The Namesake follows the Ganguli family, starting with the parents as they move from their native country of India to Massachusetts. They then have a son, whom they name Gogol, a name that Gogol himself struggles with. He's caught between the desier to blend in with the students and people around him in America and the loyalty he feels to his parents and ancestors. Lahiri follows the Ganguli family, through the eyes of Gogol, as he struggles with his name, love, acceptance, loyalty and self-discovery.
I thought this book was OK. It was a little slow paced and I didn't really feel invested in the book until I was 2/3 of the way through it. If you were only going to read one Lahiri, I would pick up The Interpreter of Maladies instead.
Avon Romance with Curry Spices
The Namesake begins as a novel of immigration, a familiar genre for obvious reasons in the USA. The first two chapters, describing the dislocation and alienation of the Gangulis upon moving to Cambridge, MA, are relatively poignant and evocative, though the same experiences have been described more memorably in dozens of books. Then the American-born second generation son, Gogol, is introduced, and the rest of the book focuses on his prolonged identity crisis, especially the tension he feels between the expectations of his family and his own desire for assimilation. Again, there's not much new here; the same story has been told with greater realism and more believable individuation of characters by writers from all corners of the planet, including such masterpieces of fiction as "The Bread Givers" by Anzia Yezierska, "Peder Victorious" by Ole Rolvaag, and "Call It Sleep" by Henry Roth, as well as very fine books by more recent writers like Amy Tan, Gus Lee, Julia Alvarez, and more. As a novel of immigration, The Namesake doesn't belong on the same shelf as these. But it doesn't try to. In fact, it changes genres completely around the third chapter, becoming a story of failed love, or rather of serial romatic failures, three humdrum and futile sexual partnerships (one a marriage) all based on mere happenstance of encounter and all ending "not with a bang but a whimper." Honestly, Nikhil Gogol Ganguli is too boringly self-absorbed to be much of a partner, or to be very entertaining to read about. He learns nothing from his wussy love affairs, and in truth there's nothing to learn.
There's nothing especially potent about Jhumpa Lahiri's prose, either. Descriptions are as stale as the dilemmas of life her characters face. Neither Cambridge nor Calcutta is vividly evoked; streets are named, buses are caught, but the imagination slumbers page after page. Likewise, the romantic episodes of Gogol's plodding life are narrated without sensuality. We are told what happens, but we don't feel empathy.
Why, perhaps you want to ask, did I bother to finish The Namesake if I disliked so much? Well, I'm a bit of a compulsive reader, and it was the only novel I had in hand at the time. Also, I began to sense that I'd have to review it by the middle of the book, so I had to finish it in order to be fair. Now I can say, in fairness, that if I were an editor, I wouldn't even consider publishing such mediocrity.
Review this book
|
