| Friday, April 09, 2004 |
| The Namesake |
 The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
I was looking forward to reading this after I read her first book, Interpreter of Maladies. But I was disappointed when I finished the book. Lahiri's so good at developing and describing her characters. That it almost felt like I grew up with them. But in the quest to develop her characters, she somehow forgot to develop her story. And when I finished the book, I was still confused about the story.
But don't get me wrong. I still love the book. I love Lahiri's writing style. It makes me feel part of the story and this book is no exception. She wrote the characters of the Ganguli family and their friends so well that they all felt like real people. That when I go to Boston or to New York or to India, I will meet the same people. And if you like that or you're a fan of Lahiri, then give this book a try.
Other reviews:
From Barnes & Noble
An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along a first-generation path strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity.
From the New York Times
Jhumpa Lahiri's quietly dazzling new novel, The Namesake, is that rare thing: an intimate, closely observed family portrait that effortlessly and discreetly unfolds to disclose a capacious social vision. … In chronicling more than three decades in the Gangulis' lives, Ms. Lahiri has not only given us a wonderfully intimate and knowing family portrait, she has also taken the haunting chamber music of her first collection of stories and reorchestrated its themes of exile and identity to create a symphonic work, a debut novel that is as assured and eloquent as the work of a longtime master of the craft. — Michiku Kakutani
Other book reviews for The Namesake |
posted by Jax @ 10:34:00 PM   |
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