“It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to.” ― W.C. Fields
“What's your name,' Coraline asked the cat. 'Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?'
'Cats don't have names,' it said.
'No?' said Coraline.
'No,' said the cat. 'Now you people have names. Thaat's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline
“Names have power.” ― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief
“I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it. I don't believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
The Namesake is the story of Gogol Ganguli. But like all of us our stories don't begin with us, we are just the next chapter in a very long book so this story begins with Gogol's parents.
Ashima and and Ashoke are paired together in an arranged marriage in India and then spend their life together in the U.S. settling in Massachusetts where Ashoke is working on his Phd at MIT. Even with beginning with them, this is still really Gogol's story. His name is the thread that ties his to theirs. His parents don't have a good name for him, they are waiting a letter from Ashram's grandmother with the name to arrive from India. The letter doesn't come and they are told they need to name their son before they can leave the hospital (this is 1968). They do have a pet name for him so they put that on his birth certificate. And the name becomes a cross for him to carry for the rest of his life.
There is another thread that runs through Gogol's story, who is he apart from his parents and the rest of the Bengali community they are a part of, what does it mean for his life to be an American child but not feel like he is fully American but also to not feel like he is part of the Bengali side either. He is floating in some middle ground trying to find out what and who he is, as a child, a teen, and a man.
Something I particularly love about reading Lahiri is the way she can make the reader feel. In The Namesake you can feel the tension between Gogol and his parents, between Gogol and his peers, between Gogol and the weight he feels from his name.
A commonality between all of her books and something else I really love is the snapshot way she writes. Whether it is in her short stories (Unaccustomed Earth and interpreter of maladies) or her novels (The Lowland and The Namesake) you don't get all of the details. You get glimpses of moments in time and she makes them count. In the novels you get to spend some important moments and learn some of the story then you jump ahead and time has passed, months or even years, and the story picks up again. In the short stories the moment is jump into and there is never any backstory and then when the moment ends so does the story, these aren't typical beginning, middle, end stories just shorter than novels, these are just bits of the lives of the characters, just the part they want to share with you. While that sounds jarring or abrupt it isn't. It is an interesting way to tell you about the people on the pages. There is no back story and we don't find out where they end up you just get in intimate glimpse into a brief time. And I promise it is enjoyable.
This was my fourth Jhumpa Lahiri read:
Unaccustomed Earth
interpreter of maladies
The Lowland
(Finished January 24, 2016)
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