Now a major motion picture! THE NAMESAKE follows the Ganguli family through its journey from Calcutta to Cambridge to the Boston suburbs. Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli arrive in America at the end of the 1960s, shortly after their arranged marriage in Calcutta, in order for Ashoke to finish his engineering degree at MIT. Ashoke is forward-thinking, ready to enter into American culture if not fully at least with an open mind. His young bride is far less malleable. Isolated, desperately missing her large family back in India, she will never be at peace with this new world.
Soon after they arrive in Cambridge, their first child is born, a boy. According to Indian custom, the child will be given two names: an official name, to be bestowed by the great-grandmother, and a pet name to be used only by family. But the letter from India with the child's official name never arrives, and so the baby's parents decide on a pet name to use for the time being. Ashoke chooses a name that has particular significance for him: on a train trip back in India several years earlier, he had been reading a short story collection by one of his most beloved Russian writers, Nikolai Gogol, when the train derailed in the middle of the night, killing almost all the sleeping passengers onboard. Ashoke had stayed awake to read his Gogol, and he believes the book saved his life. His child will be known, then, as Gogol.
Lahiri brings her enormous powers of description to her first novel, infusing scene after scene with profound emotional depth. Condensed and controlled, THE NAMESAKE covers three decades and crosses continents, all the while zooming in at very precise moments on telling detail, sensory richness, and fine nuances of character.
Jhumpa Lahiri, author of a Pulitzer Prize-wining short story collection, offers as her first novel the multigenerational story of the Ganguli family, who arrive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from Calcutta in the 1960s. Over 40 years, we follow the arranged marriage of Western-oriented Ashoke and his traditional wife, Ashima, and the efforts of their children to live both American and Indian lives. It's an involving novel, replete with Lahiri's trademark social observations and fine-tuned jewel-like phrasing. Sarita Choudhury has a pleasant voice, and manages an American-accented narration and Bengali accents very well. One comment on the production quality, however--sudden changes in the narrator's tone and the sound level indicate that many words and phrases were rerecorded and dubbed into the original. It's a bit off-putting in an otherwise excellent audiobook. A.C.S. 2004 Audie Award Finalist (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine
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