Within the first year of the Gangulis arrival, Ashmina becomes pregnant with the couple's first child. Adhering to Bengali tradition, Ashmina's grandmother is supposed to name the baby, but her letter never arrives. Ashoke contemplates and comes up with the only name he can think of: Gogol, after the Russian writer, whose volume of short stories saved his life during a fatal train derailment in India. Both Ashoke and Ashmina desire that Gogol have a Bengali life in America despite being one of few Indian families in their area.

Top photo of Bengali students at Harvard by Shifa Hossain from mittalsouthasiainstitute.harvard.edu This change in name and Gogol's going to Yale, rather than following his father's footsteps to MIT, sets up the barriers between Gogol and his family. The distance, both geographically and emotionally, between Gogol and his parents continues to increase. He wants to be American, not Bengali. He goes home less frequently, dates American girls, and becomes angry when anyone calls him Gogol. During his college years, he smokes cigarettes and marijuana, goes to many parties, and loses his virginity to a girl he cannot remember. Time passes. The couple takes a trip to Paris, where Moushumi delivers a paper at a conference. The marriage strains. Moushumi likes spending time with her artistic, Brooklyn friends, whereas Gogol finds them frustrating and selfish. Gogol also resents the specter of Graham, Moushumi’s banker ex-fiancé, who was good friends with the artistic crew Moushumi still adores. Moushumi, feeling confined in the marriage, begins an affair with an old friend, an aimless academic named Dimitri Desjardins. She keeps the affair from Gogol for several months, but eventually Nikhil catches her in a lie, and she admits all to him. They divorce.

But for me personally, the best part of the novel was Gogol's marriage to his childhood family friend Maushami Muzumdar. The latter is far from a conventional Bengali girl and Gogol is attracted to her individualistic streak and high living. In many ways, Maushami bridges a certain important gap in his mind and presents to him the best of both worlds --- she's Bengali like him, so in a strange way that's a comforting feeling. At the same time, she displays the same excessive, broadminded living of the Americans.

The 'name' issue is interesting but it's a bit of a stretch on the author's part to make it the central framework for the entire saga. I tried hard to relate the story of ‘The Overcoat’ to the main character's life in an effort to understand everything better, but apart from wondering if his yearning for an ideal name could be compared to Akaki’s yearning for the perfect overcoat, I was lost. There isn't an elaborate plot other than that life happens. We touch base with Gogol going to college (Yale), having his first romantic and then sexual experiences, breaking up, getting a job. When Gogol goes to Yale it's 1982, so we learn about his first adventures with girls, alcohol and pot.This book tells a story which must be familiar to anyone who has migrated to another country - the fact that having made the transition to a new culture you are left missing the old and never quite achieving full admittance into the new. In fact a feeling of never quite belonging to either. After finishing the Namesake, my thoughts were drawn to my last roommate in college, an Indian woman studying for her PHD in Psychology. When I first moved in, she had just broken up with her white boyfriend. “It never would have worked out anyway…” she had cried. By the end of that same year she was flying of to Houston to be wed to a man she had only seen once, a marriage arranged by their parents. Many nights my other roommate (an exchange student from Berlin) and I would sit out on the balcony smoking cigarettes and marveling at the concept of an arranged marriage in the new millennium. This book made me understand her a little bit better, her choice in marriage and other aspects of our briefly shared lives, like: her putting palm oil in her hair, the massive Dutch oven that was constantly blowing steam, or her mother living with us for 3 months. Setting (place) In and around New England and the Northeast: notably the Boston area, New Haven, and New York City urn:lcp:namesakelahi00lahi:epub:c844dd23-8a4a-466c-93f6-dcc8f1a4fa3c Extramarc Cornell University Foldoutcount 0 Identifier namesakelahi00lahi Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t90878z5z Isbn 0618485228 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.

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). Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Change, and its Dependence on Stability Gogol’s life, and that of every person related to him in any way, from the day of his birth to his divorce at 30, is documented in a long monotone, like a camera trained on a still scene, without zooming in and out, recording every movement the lens catches, accidentally. A final picture emerges in which nothing in particular stands out; and twists that could have been explored more deeply, on a philosophical and humanistic level, such as Gogol’s disillusionment with his dual identity or the aftermath of (Gogol’s father) Ashoke’s death are touched upon perfunctorily or rushed through. While what Lahiri's characters' experience can be occasionally comic, she never makes them into a 'joke'. In fact, she reserves judgment, and each character, regardless of their actions, is portrayed with compassion. But alongside that awareness, I wanted Lahiri to impose some writing constraints on herself. I wanted her to consider how she would write if she had only a very limited vocabulary and the simplest of grammar structures at her disposal.

You go on knowing more about the main character as he grows up, gets involved in relationships, him getting to get to know his origin (well, he struggles to know his Indian origin and identity but yes, struggle is the word). When a letter from their grandmother in India, enclosing the name for their first born doesn't arrive in time, Ashoke instinctively and naively (as their son says later in life) names him Gogol- a name, derived from the Russian author, Nikolai Gogol, with whom the latter feels a deep connection. The name comes to embarrass their son as he grows older and is a reminder of his confused being -it's not even a proper Bengali name, he protests! He wonders how his parents had done it, leaving their respective families behind, seeing them so seldom, dwelling unconnected, in a perpetual state of expectation, of longing.”

Gogol's agony is not so much about being born to Indian parents, as much as being saddled with a name that seems to convey nothing, in a way accentuating his feeling of "not really belonging to anything" People between two worlds is the theme, as in many of the author’s books: Bengali immigrants in Boston and how they juggle the complexity of two cultures. Being a foreigner, 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, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.” 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.” But even that's not done intelligently. E.g; Maxine’s mother wears swimsuit on the lakeside; Gogol thinks his mother would never do that. Maxine’s parents don’t bother when Gogol moves into their house and have sex with Maxine; Gogol's parents would have been horrified! It is almost in these words the comparisons are made. Well, of course. We get it.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. Artios Awards". www.castingsociety.com. Archived from the original on 26 March 2020 . Retrieved 10 October 2022. The Gangulis are a family unit that grows and matures over time. Although Ashima occasionally longs for life in Calcutta, she realizes she has made a new life, a new home for herself and her family in the United States. In a sense, her own desires, for love and fulfillment and companionship, never change. But the context, and the location, in which these desires are fulfilled does. The Universality of “Foreignness”