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The
Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri Rating: •••• (Highly Recommended) |
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Alienation One of my favorite quotes from Franklin D.
Roosevelt was the beginning of a speech he made before the Daughters of the
American Revolution, “Fellow Immigrants.” What a great reminder that no
matter how many generations removed from a family’s arrival in America,
almost all residents of this country arrived from elsewhere. Jhumpa Lahiri
explores the American experience of the first and second generation of a
family from India. Protagonist Gogol knows he was named after a Russian
writer, but it takes a long time for him to come to learn why. Along the way,
his ties to India, to family, and to his new country are treated with
precision and fine writing from Lahiri. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning
of Chapter 4, set in 1982 (pp. 72-78): Gogol’s fourteenth birthday. Like most events in his life, it is another excuse for his parents to throw a party for their Bengali friends. His own friends from school were invited the previous day, a tame affair, with pizzas that his father picked up on his way home from work, a basketball game watched together on television, some Ping-Pong in the den. For the first time in his life he has said no to the frosted cake, the box of harlequin ice cream, the hot dogs in buns, the balloons and streamers taped to the walls. The other celebration, the Bengali one, is held on the closest Saturday to the actual date of his birth. As usual his mother cooks for days beforehand, cramming the refrigerator with stacks of foil-covered trays. She makes sure to prepare his favorite things: lamb curry with lots of potatoes, luchis, thick channa dal with swollen brown raisins, pineapple chutney, sandeshes molded out of saffron-tinted ricotta cheese. All this is less stressful to her than the task of feeding a handful of American children, half of whom always claim they are allergic to milk, all or whom refuse to eat the crusts of their bread. Close to forty guests come from three different
states. Women are dressed in saris far more dazzling than the pants and polo
shirts their husbands wear. A group of men sit in a circle on the floor and
immediately start a game of poker. These are his mashis and meshos, his
honorary aunts and uncles. They all bring their children; his parents' crowd
does not believe in baby-sitters. As usual, Gogol is the oldest child in the
group. He is too old to be playing hide-and-seek with eight-year-old Sonia
and her ponytailed, gap-toothed friends, but not old enough to sit in the
living room and discuss Reaganomics with his father and the rest of the
husbands, or to sit around the dining room table, gossiping, with his mother
and the wives. The closest person to him in age is a girl named Moushumi,
whose family recently moved to Massachusetts from England, and whose
thirteenth birthday was celebrated in a similar fashion a few months ago. But
Gogol and Moushumi have nothing to say to each other. Moushumi sits
cross-legged on the floor, in glasses with maroon plastic frames and a puffy
polka-dotted headband holding back her thick, chin-length hair. In her lap is
a kelly green Bermuda bag with pink piping and wooden handles; inside the bag
is a tube of 7UP-flavored lip balm that she draws from time to time across
her mouth. She is reading a well-thumbed paperback copy of Pride and
Prejudice while the other children, Gogol included, watch The Love
Boat and Fantasy Island, piled together on top and
around the sides of his parents' bed. Occasionally one of the children asks
Moushumi to say something, anything, in her English accent. Sonia asks if
she's ever seen Princess Diana on the street. "I detest American
television," Moushumi eventually declares to everyone's delight, then
wanders into the hallway to continue her reading. Presents are opened when the guests are gone. Gogol
receives several dictionaries, several calculators, several Cross
pen-and-pencil sets, several ugly sweaters. His parents give him an
Instamatic camera, a new sketchbook, colored pencils and the mechanical pen
he'd asked for, and twenty dollars to spend as he wishes. Sonia has made him
a card with Magic Markers, on paper she's ripped out of one of his own
sketchbooks, which says "Happy Birthday Goggles," the name she
insists on calling him instead of Dada. His mother sets aside the things he
doesn't like, which is most everything, to give to his cousins the next time
they go to India. Later that night he is alone in his room, listening to side
3 of the White Album on his parents' cast-off RCA turntable. The album is a
present from his American birthday party, given to him by one of his friends
at school. Born when the band was near death, Gogol is a passionate devotee
of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. In recent years he has collected nearly all
their albums, and the only thing tacked to the bulletin board on the back of
his door is Lennon's obituary, already yellow and brittle, clipped from the Boston
Globe. He sits cross-legged on the bed, hunched over the lyrics, when
he hears a knock on the door. "Come in," he boilers, expecting it to be
Sonia in her pajamas, asking if she can borrow his Magic 8 Ball or his
Rubik's Cube. He is surprised to see his father, standing in stocking feet, a
small potbelly visible beneath his oat-colored sweater vest, his mustache
turning gray. Gogol is especially surprised to see a gift in his father's
hands. His father has never given him birthday presents apart from whatever
his mother buys, but this year, his father says, walking across the room to
where Gogol is sitting, he has something special. The gift is covered in red-and-green-and-gold-striped paper
left over from Christmas the year before, taped
awkwardly at the seams. It is obviously a book, thick, hardcover, wrapped by
his father's own hands. Gogol lifts the paper slowly, but in spite of this
the tape leaves a scab. The Short Stories of Nikolai
Gogol, the jacket says. Inside, the price has been snipped away on the
diagonal. "I ordered it from the bookstore, just for
you," his father says, his voice raised in order to be heard over the
music. "It's difficult to find in hardcover these days. It's a British
publication, a very small press. It took four months to arrive. I hope you
like it. Gosrol
leans over toward the stereo to turn the volume down a bit. He would have
preferred The Hitchbiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
or even another copy of The Hobbit to replace the one he lost
last summer in Calcutta, left on the rooftop of his father's house in Alipore
and snatched away by crows. In spite of his father's occasional suggestions,
he has never been inspired to read a word of Gogol, or any Russian writer,
for that matter. He has never been told why he was really named Gogol,
doesn't know about the accident that had nearly killed his father. He thinks
his father's limp is the consequence of an injury playing soccer in his
teens. He's been told only half the truth about Gogol: that his father is a
fan. "Thanks, Baba," Gogol says, eager to
return to his lyrics. Lately he's been lazy, addressing his parents in
English though they continue to speak to him in Bengali. Occasionally he
wanders through the house with his running sneakers on. At dinner he sometimes uses a fork. His father is still standing there in his room,
watching expectantly, his hands clasped together behind his back, so Gogol
flips through the book. A single picture at the front, on smoother paper than
the rest of the pages, shows a pencil drawing of the author, sporting a
velvet jacket, a billowy white shirt and cravat. The face is foxlike, with
small, dark eyes, a thin, neat mustache, an extremely large pointy nose. Dark
hair slants steeply across his forehead and is plastered to either side of
his head, and there is a disturbing, vaguely supercilious smile set into
long, narrow lips. Gogol Ganguli is relieved to see no resemblance. True, his
nose is long but not so long, his hair dark but surely not so dark, his skin
pale but certainly not so pale. The style of his own hair is altogether
different—thick Beatle-like bangs that conceal ms brows. Gogol Ganguli wears
a Harvard sweatshirt and gray Levi's corduroys. He has worn a tie once in his
life, to attend a friend's bar mitzvah. No, he concludes confidently, there
is no resemblance at all. For
by now, he’s come to hate questions pertaining to his name, hates having
constantly to explain. He hates having to tell people that it doesn't mean
anything "in Indian." He hates having to wear a nametag on his
sweater at Model United Nations Day at school. He even hates signing his name
at the bottom of his drawings in art class. He hates that his name is both
absurd and obscure, that it has nothing to do with who he is, that it is
neither Indian nor American but of all things Russian. He hates having to
live with it, with a pet name turned good name, day after day, second after
second. He hates seeing it on the brown paper sleeve of the National Geographic
subscription his parents got him for his birthday the year before and
perpetually listed in the honor roll printed in the town's newspaper. At
times his name, an entity shapeless and weightless, manages nevertheless to
distress him physically, like the scratchy tag of a shirt he has been forced
permanently to wear. At times he wishes he could disguise it, shorten it
somehow, the way the other Indian boy in his school, Jayadev, had gotten
people to call him Jay. But Gogol, already short and catchy, resists
mutation. Other boys his age have begun to court girls already, asking them
to go to the movies or the pizza parlor, but he cannot imagine saying,
"Hi, it's Gogol" under potentially romantic circumstances. He
cannot imagine this at all. From the little he knows about Russian writers, it
dismays him that his parents chose the weirdest namesake. Leo or Anton, he
could have lived with. Alexander, shortened to Alex, he would have greatly
preferred. But Gogol sounds ludicrous to his ears, lacking dignity or
gravity. What dismays him most is the irrelevance of it all. Gogol, he's been
tempted to tell his father on more than one occasion, was his father's
favorite author, not his. Then again, it's his own fault. He could have been
known, at school at least, as Nikhil. That one day, that first day of
kindergarten, which he no longer remembers, could have changed everything. He
could have been Gogol only fifty percent of the time. Like his parents when
they went to Calcutta, he could have had an alternative identity; a B-side to
the self. "We tried," his parents explain to friends and relatives
who ask why their son lacks a good name, "but he would only respond to
Gogol. The school insisted." His parents would add, "We live in a
country where a president is called Jimmy. Really, there was nothing we could
do." "Thanks again," Gogol tells his father
now. He shuts the cover and swings his legs over the edge of the bed, to put
the book away on his shelves. But his father takes the opportunity to sit
beside him on the bed. For a moment he rests a hand on Gogol's shoulder. The
boy's body, in recent months, has grown tall, nearly as tall as Ashoke's. The
childhood pudginess has vanished from his face. The voice has begun to
deepen, is slightly husky now. It occurs to Ashoke that he and his son
probably wear the same size shoe. In the glow of the bedside lamp, Ashoke
notices a scattered down emerging on his son's upper lip. An Adam's apple is
prominent on his neck. The pale hands, like Ashima's, are long and thin.
Ashoke wonders how closely Gogol resembles himself at this age. But there are
no photographs to document Ashoke's childhood; not until his passport, not
until his life in America, does visual documentation exist. On the night
table Ashoke sees a can of deodorant, a tube of Clearasil. He lifts the book
from where it lies on the bed between them, running a hand protectively over
the cover. "I took the liberty of reading it first. It has been many
years since I have read these stories. I hope you don t mind. "No problem," Gogol says. "I feel a special kinship with Gogol,"
Ashoke says, "more than with any other writer. Do you know why?" "You like his stories." "Apart from that. He spent most of his adult
life outside his homeland. Like me." Gogol nods. "Right." "And there is another reason." The music
ends and there is silence. But then Gogol flips the record, turning the
volume up on "Revolution 1." "What's
that?" Gogol says, a bit impatiently. Ashoke looks around the room. He notices the Lennon
obituary pinned to the bulletin board, and then a cassette of classical
Indian music he'd bought for Gogol months ago, after a concert at Kresge,
still sealed in its wrapper. He sees the pile of birthday cards scattered on
the carpet, and remembers a hot August day fourteen years ago in Cambridge
when he held his son for the first time. Ever since that day, the day he
became a father, the memory of his accident has receded, diminishing over the
years. Though he will never forget that night, it no longer lurks
persistently in his mind, stalking him in the same way. It no longer looms
over his life, darkening it without warning
as it used to do. Instead, it is affixed firmly to a distant time, to a place
far from Pemberton Road. Today, his son’s birthday, is a day to honor life, not brushes with
death. And so, for now, Ashoke decides to keep the explanation of his son's
name to himself. "No other reason. Good night," he says to
Gogol, getting up from the bed. At the door he pauses, turns around. "Do
you know what Dostoyevsky once said?” Gogol
shakes his head. "'We all came out of Gogol's overcoat.'" "What's that supposed to mean?" "It
will make sense to you one day. Many happy returns of the day.” Gogol
gets up and shuts the door behind his father, who has the annoying habit of
always leaving it partly open. He fastens the lock on the knob for good
measure, then wedges the book on a high shelf between two volumes of the
Hardy Boys. He settles down again with his lyrics on the bed when something
occurs to him. This writer he is named after—Gogol isn't his first name. His
first name is Nikolai. Not only does Gogol Ganguli have a pet name turned
good name, but a last name turned first name. And so it occurs to him that no
one he knows in the world, in Russia or India or America or anywhere, shares
his name. Not even the source of his namesake. Lahiri wastes few words in The
Namesake as she shuttles readers back and forth in time. Novels of
identity abound, but few present as much reading pleasure as The
Namesake. After reading this debut novel, you may want to pick up a copy
of her 1999 story collection, Interpreter
of Maladies, which won the Pulitzer prize for fiction. Steve Hopkins, December 22, 2003 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the January 2004
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Namesake.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins &
Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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