From the back-of-the-book description
Jhumpa Lahiri's debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, took the literary world by storm when it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. Fans who flocked to her stories will be captivated by her best-selling first novel, now in paperback for the first time. The Namesake is a finely wrought, deeply moving family drama that illuminates this acclaimed author's signature themes: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the tangled ties between generations. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of an arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ashoke does his best to adapt while his wife pines for home. When their son, Gogol, is born, the task of naming him betrays their hope of respecting old ways in a new world. And we watch as Gogol stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With empathy and penetrating insight, Lahiri explores the expectations bestowed on us by our parents and the means by which we come to define who we are.

 

A Best Book of the Year

  • New York Times
  • USA Today
  • Entertainment Weekly
  • Newsday
  • San Jose Mercury News
  • New York Magazine Book of the Year

 

Reviews

Amazon.com
There's no cleverness or showing-off in The Namesake, just beautifully confident storytelling. Gogol's story is neither comedy nor tragedy; it's simply that ordinary, hard-to-get-down-on-paper commodity: real life.

The New York Times
"Dazzling...An intimate, closely observed family portrait."

Time Magazine
"Splendid."

People Magazine
"Hugely appealing."

USA Today
"What sets Lahiri apart is simple yet richly detailed writing that makes the heart ache as she meticulously unfolds the lives of her characters."

Entertainment Weekly
"An exquisitely detailed family saga...More than fulfills the promise of Lahiri's Pulitzer-winning collection."

 

About the Author
Lahiri was born in 1967 in London, England, and raised in Rhode Island. She has traveled several times to India, where both her parents were born and raised, and where a number of the stories in Interpreter of Maladies are set. She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in English literature, and of Boston University, where she received an M.A. in English, M.A. in Creative Writing and M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. A winner of the Henfield Prize from the Transatlantic Review, she has published stories in The New Yorker, Agni, Story Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her stories will appear in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories. Jhumpa received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her collection of short stories, "Interpreter of Maladies."

For more information or to purchase the book visit Amazon.com.

Nevertheless, its core

Nevertheless, its core principle has remained the same: to exercise both subtlety and thoroughness in managing both the news and the entertainment that gets presented to us.

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Correction Two minutes -

Correction

Two minutes - read two hours

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The film adaptation was

The film adaptation was over-ambitious, poorly structured and too long. The novel's plot is crammed into a runtime of over two minutes, and we are left with very little character developing emotional material.

As a result of this failure to capture human emotional interest, and exacerbated by the runtime, the film becomes little more than tedium.

The credibility of the screenplay I found surprisingly good to begin with, the cultural nuances were accurate and deftly demonstrated throughout - however the film lost every ounce of respect earned at the hotel scene after Gogol's wedding: the dancing in the hotel room... what was the purpose of that?!

Unbelievable that a screenplay so credible as this one up to that point would descend into (undoubtedly) American moviegoing crowd pleasing by shoehorning some stupid bollywood-style dance scene in. Whoever decided that would be a good idea should be shot on sight, for ruining an otherwise passable film.

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I love butt

I love butt

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Lahiri is Chekhov of the

Lahiri is Chekhov of the 21st century! I loved the book and can't wait to see the movie.

Irina Pearson.

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Good shampoo. Chekhov of

Good shampoo. Chekhov of the 21st century?! What rubbish! No, I would say reading Lahiri is like buying a very expensive french shampoo, say Kerastase or Rene Furterer. So silky and smooth, chic and well-turned out, but when people start comparing her to Austen and Chekhov, I just have to roll my eyes.

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What's the point of this

What's the point of this comment? You've offered no argument. Rather dumb really. Something about shampoo?? Are you high?

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"Good shampoo"? I've never

"Good shampoo"? I've never heard this expression before. When I compared Lahiri with Chekhov, I meant that she chooses simple yet powerful words and is able to show the depth of her characters in one or two sentences.

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I wonder why Sooni

I wonder why Sooni Taraporevala's screenplay switches the primary locus of action from the Boston area to New York. In the novel, as I recall, Gogol goes to graduate school in New York, but the family home is in the Boston suburbs. Also, the book has the Ganguli family immigrating in the early 1960s, while the film, I believe, has it a decade later. --Dilip Barman, film reviewer, www.dilip.info

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