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The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri
Lahiri's debut novel, The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin, $24, Sept. 16), may be the most anticipated literary work of the season. After all, she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction before publishing a novel.
At 32, Lahiri won the Pulitzer three years ago for a short-story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, which deals with the emotional dislocation of immigrants struggling to reconcile family traditions with a new and baffling culture.
The Namesake, set between 1968 and 1999, continues to explore that theme but more from the perspective of an American-born son of Indian immigrants.
Lahiri, the daughter of Indian immigrants, was born in London, raised in Rhode Island and frequently visited relatives in Calcutta. She began The Namesake five years ago, uncertain if it was a short story or a novel, but she soon realized "there was so much to explain" and ended up "working on a bigger canvas."
He wonders how his parents had done it, leaving their respective families behind, seeing them so seldom, dwelling unconnected, in a perpetual sense of expectation, of longing. All those trips to Calcutta he'd once resented how could they have been enough? They were not enough. Gogol knows now that his parents had lived their lives in America in spite of what was missing, with a stamina he fears he does not possess himself.
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6th September 2003, 00:06
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