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. The Namesake (12A) – BBFC". BBFC. Archived from the original on 10 October 2022 . Retrieved 7 May 2017. Time passes. The couple takes a trip to Paris, where Moushumi delivers a paper at a conference. The marriage strains. Moushumi likes spending time with her artistic, Brooklyn friends, whereas Gogol finds them frustrating and selfish. Gogol also resents the specter of Graham, Moushumi’s banker ex-fiancé, who was good friends with the artistic crew Moushumi still adores. Moushumi, feeling confined in the marriage, begins an affair with an old friend, an aimless academic named Dimitri Desjardins. She keeps the affair from Gogol for several months, but eventually Nikhil catches her in a lie, and she admits all to him. They divorce.

Yet, in spite of these fated moments, Lahiri’s novel possesses an atmosphere that is at once graceful and ordinary. The language she chooses has this quiet quality that makes that which she writes all the more realistic. Her most insightful observations into her characters, or the dynamics between them, often occur when she is recounting seemingly mundane scenes: from food preparations and family meals to phone conversations. In spite of the gentle rhythm of her narrative Lahiri also articulates the tension between past and present, India and America, parents and children, husband and wife. As Gogol grows we read of his love and sorrows, of his hopes and fears, and of his insecurities and his lifelong quest to belong. There are heartbreaking moments of affection and miscommunication, and Lahiri truly renders both the difficulties of acclimatising to another country and of embracing one's heritage in a world where to be different is to be other.The Namesake depicts the struggles of Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, first-generation immigrants from the state of West Bengal to the United States, and their American-born children Gogol and Sonia. The film takes place primarily in Kolkata, New York City, and suburbs of New York City. My hometown Jamshedpur is mentioned twice in the novel and just seeing its name in print gave me a thrill. It is the city where Ashoke was headed to when he had his train accident. I have lived in Boston and I have lived in Kolkata for three years each and I love both of those cities. 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. The book then starts following Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path. He has a strewn conflict with loyalties, crazy love affairs with Indian and non-Indian women and so much more. In the past few years I've read and fallen in love with Jhumpa Lahiri's collection of short stories as well as her book on her relationship with the Italian language In Other Words. Although The Namesake has been sitting on my shelf for the last couple months, when it was chosen as one of the February reads for the 'Around the World in 80 Books' group, I was finally spurred into reading it, and I'm so glad I did. The Namesake did not disappoint.

urn:oclc:717150522 Scandate 20111122034933 Scanner scribe20.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Usl_hit auto Worldcat (source edition) 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.You’ll have gathered by now that I think of this book in terms of a report or a historical document, one in which the author felt duty bound to record every detail of the experiences of the people whose lives she had chosen to examine. 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.

There's a lot of local color of Boston including things I remember from the old days like the Boston Globe newspaper, the ‘girls on the Boston Common,’ name brands like Hood milk, Jordan Marsh and Filene’s Basement. Immigrant anguish - the toll it takes in settling in an alien country after having bidden adieu to one’s home, family, and culture is what this prize-winning novel is supposed to explore, but it's no more than a superficial complaint about a few signature – and done to death - South Asian issues relating to marriage and paternal expectations: a clichéd immigrant story, I'm afraid to say. There are thousands of Ashimas in America and on behalf of all of them I would like to thank Jhumpa Lahiri for creating this character, who in essence, is all of us.This is the experience for Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli and it is probably made worse by the fact that India and America have such totally different cultures. The story follows their lives for 32 years from when Ashima is pregnant and facing delivering her first child the American way without the comfort of her extended Indian family and all their social customs to help her. 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" Lahiri taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Much of her short fiction concerns the lives of Indian-Americans, particularly Bengalis. We get glimpses of how the cultural differences affect his parents too. It’s not until she is 47 that his stay-at-home mother makes her real first non-Indian friends, working part-time at the local library.

The Namesake is the story of two generations of the Gangulis, a family of Indian immigrants to the United States. E direi che Jhumpa Lahiri lo assolve bene, sa trovare le parole giuste per raccontare il malessere dei suoi personaggi, sia maschili che femminili. As its title indicates, The Namesake is a novel of identities. Gogol grows up perplexed by his pet name. He feels it is not his own, and it is not until college, after he has legally changed it to Nikhil, that his father tells him the story that lies behind it. Gogol realizes that it is one thing to change one’s name officially, but another thing to become a different person. Gogol tries on different identities at different stages of his life: in college, with Ruth, after college, with Maxine, and in his marriage to Moushumi. Another of the novel’s protagonists. Ashima, at the beginning of the novel, does not make choices so much as she accepts the choices of others. Her parents arrange her marriage to Ashoke, and out of duty she follows him to cold, desolate-seeming Boston. She grows to love her husband, and, later, her son Gogol and daughter Sonia. But for years, Ashima misses her family in Calcutta and yearns desperately for her old life there. Only after many years, and following her husband’s death while away in Ohio, does Ashima realize that the Boston area is her home, and that she is surrounded by friends and a surrogate family there. Show, not tell. Perhaps you've heard the phrase, over and over and over to a nauseatingly horrific extent without any additional information as to how exactly to go about accomplishing this mantra. There's a multitude of reasons for following this niftily short doctrine, and one of them is fully encompassed by this novel here, with its unholy engorgement on lists.After much internal struggle, he changes his name to a more acceptable Indian name, Nikhil and feels it would enable him to face the world more confidently. Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.” Train journeys a beautiful leitmotiv bringing change, reflection, direction, encounters, love, life, death.