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I, an East Tennessee gal, identified so strongly with Lahiri's protagonist, Gogol Ganguli, a second-generation Bengali guy, that by book's end, I was a soppy, teary mess.An interesting thing about this book for me was that I'm right around Gogol's age. On his fourteenth birthday, Gogol receives a gift from his father: a beautifully bound volume of Nikolai Gogol's short stories. The first is a woman from Manhattan who attracts him because she and her wealthy, cosmopolitan family are so different from his parents. And when he grows up, he legally changes his name to Nikhil.Gogol's struggles between American culture and Indian culture is personified, in his adulthood, by two women. With him on the train, he'd carried a book of short stories by the Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol, and it was a page of Ashoke's favorite story, "The Overcoat," that he was clutching when he was rescued.Ashoke and Ashima had planned to give their son a name that Ashima's grandmother promised to recommend, but since they need a name to put on his birth certificate, Ashoke decides to call him Gogol, after his favorite writer. And oh yeah - like Gogol, I have an odd name (though I like mine).The story starts when Gogol's parents, Ashoke and Ashima, emigrate from Calcutta to America and settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so Ashoke can study engineering at MIT.
Soon thereafter, Gogol is born.When Ashoke and Ashima arrive in America, they must get to know each other while they're getting to know their new country, for theirs was an arranged marriage. And for years, Ashoke has been haunted by the memory of a terrible train accident that nearly took his life. Here we have a novel that illustrates the power of fiction to deeply touch the heart. It is these truths that form the raw material of his hopes for his future.The Namesake is a beautifully written novel - the characters, particularly Gogol and his father - formed themselves in my mind like memories of people I've known. He resents his name more and more, as it seems to epitomize how he doesn't fit in anywhere. Young Gogol, however, isn't impressed: he's more interested in the Beatles, so he shelves the book and forgets about it. The book is bittersweet and poignant and speaks, simultaneously, of hope and regret, of life's beauty and its injustices.It's worth noting, too, that Ashoke's favorite story, "The Overcoat", is about a humble clerk who dies of fright after being upbraided by an Important Person, only to get his revenge in the afterlife.
It's when Ashoke sees his son for the first time that his haunting memories of the train accident begin to ease their grip on his mind.Ashima's grandmother has a stroke, and Gogol never gets his "good" name. So much about his growing-up years was familiar from my childhood, from Rubik's Cube to the TV shows that were widely shown at the time. The second, like Gogol, is a second-generation Bengali - their parents are friends, and they'd grown up together. Gogol will be his pet name, and he'll get his "good" name when the grandmother's recommendation arrives. And as he grows up, his pet name, Gogol - and its oddness - becomes a symbol for his being part of one culture (India - his parents') and part of another (America) but not wholly in either one. I won't give anything away here, but I'll say that each relationship, in its way, teaches Gogol something about himself and encourages him to look within to find and articulate his personal truths about being a young man torn between two worlds. Keep that in mind as you read this wonderful book - it's a subtle but evocative metaphor that's a central thread throughout.
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