English: The Namesake

Take a boy, born in the late 1960s to Indian parents living in the American suburbs, far from their native Calcutta. Chart his progress from babyhood to confused, faintly rebellious teenage years and on to an Ivy League university, fulfilling work as an architect, an apartment in 90s Manhattan. All as far as possible from his parents' life of saris and sandals and doggedly maintained Bengali ritual.

Jhumpa Lahiri's first book, a collection of short stories titled Interpreter of Maladies, met with acclaim when it was published in 1999, winning a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a PEN/Hemingway Award, and an American Academy of Arts & Letters Metcalf Award. The stories, set in India and America, considered the connection of place and identity, particularly the identity of the immigrant, who becomes more or less assimilated into a new world, more or less distanced from his native land. The Namesake continues that theme of identity, complicating it with questions about cultural disorientation, loyalty to one's personal and national heritage, and the significance of traditions, family, and, most essentially, one's very name. It is a book about possibility and loss, elegantly and delicately written, and, as Lahiri has admitted in interviews, about themes deeply and personally felt.

Reflecting on the power of names as markers of identity, Jhumpa Lahiri takes the reader through the life of Gogol Ganguli, a second-generation male US immigrant from India. She delineates with insight and empathy how two generations of the Ganguli family come to terms with their very different lives and how, despite resistance and alienation, manage to build a bridge to each other. In a nation of immigrants, such stories are hardly unusual. Immigrants loosely grouped as "Asian" are beginning to write about their parents' homelands. In this novel, Lahiri introduces her Western readers to Bengali upper-caste, (Hindus of high ritual status), middle-class, well-educated immigrants who came to the US in the late 1960s to work in the medical and engineering professions or to teach in universities. Their middle-class status sets the Bengalis apart from many American immigrant communities, though the experience of cleaving to the ethnic community remains the same.