Annual Gotham Awards Unveil Nominees for Year's Best Independent Films". PRWeb. 22 October 2007. Archived from the original on 10 October 2022 . Retrieved 10 October 2022. Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.” 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. Gogol’s second serious girlfriend. Maxine and Gogol meet in New York, at a party. Maxine represents, for Gogol, a life very different from his own. She lives with her parents downtown, in a beautiful townhouse, and shares their intellectual, cosmopolitan life. Maxine does not always understand Gogol’s family’s traditions, but she tries to, and seems to care genuinely for him. After Ashoke’s death, Gogol pulls away from Maxine, leaving her out of the mourning ceremonies. They soon separate. Ruth There had been a long lead-up to this line which ends a chapter. 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.

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.One of the Gangulis’ Bengali customs is hosting house parties for all of their Bengali American friends. Gogol’s fourteenth birthday is such a party, and he meets a shy girl his own age named Moushumi, who becomes his wife years later. During Gogol’s tenth grade year, the Ganguli family travels to India for eight months; Gogol and Sonia feel out of place and can’t wait to return to America. During Gogol’s senior year in high school, he pretends to be a college student and kisses a college girl at a party; just before the kiss, he tells her that his name is “Nikhil.” Library Journal describes the novel as, “this poignant treatment of the immigrant experience, which is a rich, stimulating fusion of authentic emotion, ironic observation, and revealing details.” Booklist review says, “Lahiri's deeply knowing, avidly descriptive, and luxuriously paced first novel is equally triumphant as Interpreter of Maladies”

The film has cameo appearances by actor Samrat Chakrabarti, academic Partha Chatterjee and visual artist Naeem Mohaiemen. For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy—a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that 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 from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.” Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri was born in London and brought up in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Brought up in America by a mother who wanted to raise her children to be Indian, she learned about her Bengali heritage from an early age. Ron Rash is renowned for his writing about Appalachia, but his latest book, The Caretaker, begins ... an illustrator in Calcutta. Ashima’s father dies in Chapter 2, as the family is preparing to return to India to visit. His death is very difficult for Ashima, who feels distant from her family. Ashima’s grandmother

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 2000, Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for her story collection Interpreter of Maladies, becoming the first Indian to win the award. In the last story, an engineering graduate student arrives in Cambridge from Calcutta, starting a life in a new country. This story is the basis for The Namesake, Lahiri's first full length novel where she weaves together elements from her own life to paint a picture of the Indian immigrant experience in the United States. The book is full of metaphors that appear meaningful at first glance but then you say, wait a minute, what does that really mean? As, for example, when the main character and his father walk to the very end of a breakwater, and the father says: “Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere else to go.” 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. 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.

IFF "Love Is Folly" " (in Bulgarian). 4 March 2018. Archived from the original on 10 October 2022 . Retrieved 10 October 2022. 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.

Adam Bede

I think it’s realistic how this young American Bengali boy sometimes absorbs and sometimes rebels against the culture. He and his friends joke about themselves as “ABCD - American Born Confused Deshi.” He and his parents and sister speak Bengali at home but he makes a point of doing things like answering his parents in English and wearing his sneakers in the house. He pulls away from his Bengali heritage at college, deliberately ‘not hanging out with Indians.’ Climax: Debatably, in a novel whose scope spans three decades, the climax comes when Gogol’s father, Ashoke, dies unexpectedly, causing Gogol to return toward his family, leave Maxine, and ultimately marry Moushumi. The second important aspect of The Namesake is much like the first: the relationship between names and identities. As the novel’s title implies, the matter of Gogol’s name and his namesake is central to the story. The name “Gogol” complicates Gogol’s childhood identity because it is neither American nor Bengali. Gogol’s rejecting his childhood name in favor of the name “Nikhil” coincides with his attempt to flee everything about his childhood as well. When he calls himself “Nikhil,” Gogol feels like a different person, and he prefers being this other person. Still, the rich history of the name “Gogol” is also part of the heritage Gogol receives from his father—and in the end of the novel, Gogol’s choice to be at peace with his own past is also a choice to begin reading about the original Gogol who changed his father’s life.

As Lahiri recounts the story of this family, she also interrogates concepts of cultural identity, of dislocation and rootlessness, of cultural and generational divides, and of tradition and familial expectation. As the title of the novel suggests, The Namesake focuses on Gogol’s fraught relationship with his own name. As the American-born son of Bengali parents, Gogol struggles to reconcile himself with his Russian name. His uncommon name comes to symbolise his own self-divide and reticence to embrace his parents’ culture. E da qui, perciò, il destino nel nome (che è il titolo italiano del film del 2006 diretto da Mira Nair basato su questo romanzo).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. 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 wedding, 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 in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. I could really connect to this book and my immersion in the character of Ashima was so complete that when an unexpected tragedy hits her, it upset me deeply. I had to close the book and put it down as I started crying uncontrollably. A little later, I resumed reading the book with a heavy heart. 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! Gogol is aware of how thoroughly out-of-place and lost his parents would be in this scene above. Social gatherings at his parents’ suburban house when he grew up were day-long weekend events with a dozen Bengali families and their children eating in shifts at multiple tables. His parents acted as caterers seeing to the needs of all the guests while the children ate separately and played, older ones watching the younger ones.