new york times book review namesake

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Book Review: Namesake by Adrienne Young

Trader. Fighter. Survivor.

With the Marigold ship free of her father, Fable and its crew were set to start over. That freedom is short-lived when she becomes a pawn in a notorious thug’s scheme. In order to get to her intended destination she must help him to secure a partnership with Holland, a powerful gem trader who is more than she seems.

As Fable descends deeper into a world of betrayal and deception she learns that her mother was keeping secrets, and those secrets are now putting the people Fable cares about in danger. If Fable is going to save them then she must risk everything, including the boy she loves and the home she has finally found.

Filled with action, emotion, and lyrical writing, New York Times bestselling author Adrienne Young returns with Namesake , the final book in the captivating Fable duology.

Title: Namesake Author: Adrienne Young Genre: YA Fantasy Format: Digital ARC Publisher: Wednesday Books Date Published: March 16th, 2021 Rating: 4//5 Owls

I’m a huge fan of Adrienne Young’s books, but in my opinion she struggles a bit with sequels. Technically a companion sequel, but The Girl the Sea Gave Back, although a good book, wasn’t nearly as good as Sky In The Deep. I absolutely loved Fable, but to me Namesake falls just a little short of its predecessor.

Namesake picks up right where Fable ended, and we’re immediately thrown back into Fable’s journey. Fable has just been captured by Zola, and has no idea what he wants from her, and to make things worse – her fathers first mate, his confidant, Clove, is by his side.

I loved seeing more of these characters and other characters that were only briefly mentioned/seen in Fable. In addition to more of Zola and Clove, we got Holland, Ryland, and Koy. I loved seeing these characters get more development and more screen time (what is the literary equivalent of screen time? page time?) and trying to figure out their morals and what side they’re on.

One thing I did not like with the introduction of all these characters – we got a lot less of the crew of The Marigold and Fable’s found family. They had a lot more issues in this book, and it was disappointing to see them never get resolved properly. They were separated for so much of the novel, and I just wanted more of them together. Funnily enough, on that same thought, one of my least favorite things about this story was how much it did focus on relationships. Fable’s relationships with Clove, Saint, West, Koy, and Holland were the main focus of the novel. There wasn’t nearly as much plot or moving forward, the dynamic shifted from “trying to reunite with Saint/Control the Narrows/etc” to more of a character driven story and Fable finding her place amongst the chaos surrounding her.

There was SOME plot with these new characters, and the search for Midnight, but these things did seem to fall in the background a little from the character development. I would have loved to see more action in this world. Although, the search for Midnight and the various people that wanted it was wonderfully paced and exciting to read. (I’m really trying not to spoil things in this review, its proving a bit tricky!)

Speaking of the world however, Adrienne Young did a phenomenal job with world building, and I loved every moment of seeing the place she created. As the area that we get to see expanded, Young wrote it in such a beautiful and descriptive way that I truly felt like I understood this pirate land and I want to see even more of it. I would adore seeing spin-off series set in the same place one day. (Maybe one focused on Willa?!)

Overall, I did love this book. The world was rich and exciting and I loved seeing more of Fable’s adventure. Although I thought it focused a little too much on characters, I truly enjoyed the journey. There were some wonderful moments between Fable and Saint, and I liked seeing characters cross the boundaries of good and bad and be more morally grey characters. My favorite new character was Holland – and although I really want to talk more about her its hard to do so without spoiling some major things. She’s terrible, corrupt, but she’s also completely badass and goes after what she wants – no matter the cost or who she has to betray. I’m a huge fan of likable villains, and she hit all the right marks for me on that front. Even Saint, who I absolutely hated in the first book (seriously who abandons their child like that?!!?) proved that there’s a lot more to him than we originally thought.

I highly recommend this book, even though I didn’t love every aspect of it. It’s a good follow up to Fable and I cannot wait to see what Adrienne Young does next!

*Thank You NetGalley for the Advanced Copy of Namesake. All Opinions are my own.

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Review: Namesake by Adrienne Young

The brand-new thrilling novel from New York Times best-selling author of Sky in the Deep Adrienne Young, the second book in the fantastic Fable duology. Trader. Fighter. Survivor.

As Fable descends deeper into a world of betrayal and deception, she learns that the secrets her mother took to her grave are now putting the people Fable cares about in danger. If Fable is going to save them then she must risk everything, including the boy she loves and the home she has finally found.

My Thoughts…

I read the first book in this duology, Fable , last year and I loved it so much it easily found its way on my best of 2020 list . So as you can probably imagine, I was equal parts excited for Namesake and terrified to read it out of concern that it wouldn’t meet my now very, very high expectations. But, while in a sense it didn’t, I still ended up really enjoying Namesake as well.

Namesake picks up exactly where Fable left off , which would have been perfect if I’d read these straight after one another. Because obviously I didn’t, despite knowing that my memory is just not good enough for me to try stunts like this, it took me a minute to actually remember who some of the secondary characters were and what their deal was. Once I’d caught up, Namesake started flowing as easily as Fable had , and I was soon immersed in this world again.

Without going into too much detail to avoid spoilers, this book shows a new side to Fable . Where in the previous book the focus was on Fable looking for (and finding) her family and her place in the world, this time it’s all about holding on to what she has – and as such, the stakes have never been higher. There was a lot more politics as well, and plenty of discussions featuring trade routes and regulations. I actually appreciated this as it helped flesh out the world even more and added depth to most of what we’d learned in the previous book. But don’t worry! There was still plenty of deviousness, treachery and backstabbing to keep me on my toes, as the characters continue being their usual murderous selves.

The characters were actually what let me down a bit in this book, sadly . I had loved the interactions and the Marigold crew in the previous book and was really looking forward to a greater development of those characters and their dynamics in the sequel. Unfortunately, this didn’t really happen. For the most part, we actually followed a completely new set of characters (aside from Fable) and, when the Marigold crew finally made an appearance, all they did was argue, leaving me with close to zero new development.

West was probably the biggest letdown , as he displayed really horrible behaviour towards everyone, continuing in this even after he was called out on it and explicitly asked to stop. I did enjoy getting to know and re-evaluating some secondary characters from the previous book who had space to shine here , and to my surprise, previously horrible Koy and Saint actually became my new faves. As much as I love found family tropes, the father-daughter scenes in this book were hands down the best and absolutely unbeatable .

Keeping up with the ruthlessness and darkness of the previous book, Namesake was a highly satisfying conclusion to this duology . Even though some of the characters didn’t quite live up to the previous book, there was plenty here to keep me entertained and turning the pages way into the night.

Rating: 4/5

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Reviews of The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

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Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection, The Interpreter of Maladies, an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations.

Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors it received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America. In The Namesake , Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail -- the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase -- that opens whole worlds of emotion. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 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 the 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.

1968 On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chili pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the mix. Ashima has been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout India, spilling from newspaper cones. Even now that there is barely space inside her, it is the one thing she craves. Tasting from a cupped palm, she frowns; as usual, there’s something missing. She stares blankly at the pegboard behind the countertop where her cooking utensils hang, all slightly coated with grease. She wipes sweat from her face with the free end of her sari. Her swollen feet ache against speckled gray linoleum. Her pelvis aches from the baby’s weight....

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

The Namesake opens with Ashima Ganguli trying to make a spicy Indian snack from American ingredients — Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts — but "as usual, there's something missing." How does Ashima try and make over her home in Cambridge to remind her of what she's left behind in Calcutta? Throughout The Namesake , how does Jhumpa Lahiri use food and clothing to explore cultural transitions — especially through rituals, like the annaprasan, the rice ceremony? Some readers have said that Lahiri's writing makes them crave the meals she evokes so beautifully. What memories or desires does Lahiri bring up for you? Does her writing ever make you "hunger"?
The title The Namesake reflects the struggles Gogol Ganguli goes ...
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On Sale: June 4, 2019

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UPCOMING EVENTS

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The World of the Narrows (Volume 2)

Author: Adrienne Young

ONE The knock of a pulley hitting the deck made me blink, and suddenly the white-washed world around me came rushing back. Footsteps on wood. Shadows on the quarterdeck. The snap of rippling sails up the mainmast. The pain in my head erupted as I squinted against the glare of sunlight and counted. The crew of the Luna was at least twenty, probably more with the Waterside strays on board. There had to be a hand or two belowdecks or tucked away into the helmsman’s quarters. I hadn’t seen Zola since I’d woken on his ship, the hours passing slowly as the sun fell down the western sky at an excruciating pace. A door slammed in the passageway and the ache in my jaw woke as I clenched my teeth. Clove’s heavy steps crossed the deck as he walked to the helm. His rough hands found the spokes as his gaze set on the glowing horizon. I hadn’t seen my father’s navigator since that day on Jeval four years ago when he and Saint pushed the tender boat out into the shallows and left me on the beach. But I knew his face. I’d know it anywhere because it was painted into almost every memory I had. Of the Lark . Of my parents. He was there, even in the oldest, most broken pieces of the past. Clove hadn’t so much as looked at me since I’d first spotted him, but I could see in the way his chin stayed lifted, keeping his gaze drifting over my head, that he knew exactly who I was. He had been my only family outside of my parents, and the night the Lark sank in Tempest Snare, he’d saved my life. But he’d also never looked back as he and my father sailed away from Jeval. And he’d never come back for me, either. When I found Saint in Ceros and he told me that Clove was gone, I’d imagined him as a pile of bones stacked on the silt in the deep of the Narrows. But here he was, navigator of the Luna . He could feel my stare as I studied him, perhaps the same memory resurrecting itself from where he’d had it carefully buried. It kept his spine straight, his cool expression just the tiniest bit thin. But he wouldn’t look at me, and I didn’t know if that meant he was still the Clove I remembered or if he’d become something different. The distance between the two could mean my life. A pair of boots stopped before the mast and I looked up into the face of a woman I’d seen that morning. Her cropped, straw-colored hair blew across her forehead as she set a bucket of water beside me and pulled the knife from her belt. She crouched down and the sunlight glinted on the blade as she reached for my hands. I pulled away from her, but she jerked the ropes forward, fitting the cold iron knife against the raw skin at my wrist. She was cutting me loose. I went still, watching the deck around us, my mind racing as I carefully slid my feet beneath me. Another yank of the knife and my hands were free. I held them out, my fingers trembling. As soon as her gaze dropped, I pulled in a sharp breath and launched myself forward. Her eyes went wide as I barreled into her, and she hit the deck hard, her head slamming into the wood. I pinned her weight to the coil of ropes against the starboard side and reached for the knife. Footsteps rushed toward us as a deep voice sounded at my back. “Don’t. Let her get it out of her system.” The crew froze and in the second I took to look over my shoulder, the woman rolled out from under me, catching my side with the heel of her boot. I growled, scrambling toward her until I had hold of her wrist. She tried to kick me as I slammed it into the iron crank that stowed the anchor. I could feel the small bones beneath her skin crack as I brought it down again harder, and the knife fell from her grip. I climbed over her and snatched it up, spinning so that my back pressed against the railing. I lifted the shaking blade before me. All around us, there was only water. No land as far as I could see in any direction. My chest suddenly felt as if it was caving in, my heart sinking. “Are you finished?” The voice lifted again, and every head turned back to the passageway. The Luna ’s helmsman stood with his hands in his pockets, looking not the least bit concerned by the sight of me standing over one of his crew with a knife in my hands. Zola wove through the others with the same amusement that had shone in his eyes at the tavern in Ceros. His face was lit with a wry grin. “I said clean her up, Calla.” His gaze fell to the woman at my feet. She glared at me, furious under the attention of her crew. Her broken hand was cradled to her ribs, already swelling. Zola took four slow steps before one hand left his pocket. He held it out to me, his chin jerking toward the knife. When I didn’t move, he smiled wider. A cold silence fell over the ship for just a moment before his other hand flew up, finding my throat. His fingers clamped down as he slammed me into the railing and squeezed until I couldn’t draw breath. His weight drifted forward until I was leaning over the side of the ship and the toes of my boots lifted from the deck. I searched the heads behind him for Clove’s wild blond hair, but he wasn’t there. When I almost fell backward, I dropped the knife and it hit the deck with a sharp ping, skittering across the wood until it was out of reach. Calla picked it up, sliding it back into her belt, and Zola’s hand instantly let me go. I dropped, collapsing into the ropes and choking on the air. “Get her cleaned up,” he said again. Zola looked at me for another moment before he turned on his heel. He strode past the others to the helm where Clove leaned into the wheel with the same indifferent expression cast over his face. Calla yanked me up by my arm with her good hand and shoved me back toward the bow, where the bucket of water was still sitting beside the foremast. The crew went back to work as she pulled a rag from the back of her belt. “Take those off.” She spat, looking at my clothes: “Now.” My eyes trailed to the deckhands working behind her before I turned toward the bow and pulled my shirt over my head. Calla crouched beside me, rubbing the rag over a block of soap and drenching it in the bucket until it lathered. She held the cloth out to me impatiently, and I took it, ignoring the attention of the crew as I scrubbed the suds up over my arms. The dried blood turned the water pink before it rolled over my skin and dripped onto the deck at my feet. The feel of my own skin brought back to life the memory of West in his quarters, his warmth pressing against mine. Tears smarted behind my eyes again, and I sniffed them back, trying to push the vision away before it could drown me. The smell of morning when I woke in his bed. The way his face looked in the gray light, and the feel of his breath on me. I reached up to the hollow of my throat, remembering the ring I’d traded for at the gambit. His ring. Copyright © 2021 by Adrienne Young

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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Following the Hello Sunshine Book Club pick Fable , New York Times bestselling author Adrienne Young...

Book Details

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Following the Hello Sunshine Book Club pick Fable , New York Times bestselling author Adrienne Young returns with Namesake, a captivating conclusion to the duology, filled with action, emotion, and lyrical writing. Trader. Fighter. Survivor. With the Marigold ship free of her father, Fable and its crew were set to start over. That freedom is short-lived when she becomes a pawn in a notorious thug’s scheme. In order to get to her intended destination she must help him to secure a partnership with Holland, a powerful gem trader who is more than she seems. As Fable descends deeper into a world of betrayal and deception, she learns that the secrets her mother took to her grave are now putting the people Fable cares about in danger. If Fable is going to save them then she must risk everything, including the boy she loves and the home she has finally found.

Imprint Publisher

Wednesday Books

9781250254399

In The News

"[A] richly imagined maritime world... Fans of the first volume will be pleased with this duology closer." — Kirkus Reviews “An exciting, fast-paced ride that will ultimately satisfy those that stepped on board the Marigold with Fable last year...There’s plenty to love about this sequel: Its relentless pace keeps the story feeling as though something new and dramatic is happening on every page.” —Culturess “Fans of the first book will recognize this seaswept world of ruthless criminals and daring adventure, and they’ll be satisfied to see Fable and West, noble, flawed, and devoted to each other and their crew, find their place in it.” —The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books “A stunning conclusion to an enthralling YA fantasy duology.” —Young Adults Book Central

About the Creators

The Namesake

4.4 • 58 Ratings

Publisher Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations. Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity from “a writer of uncommon elegance and poise.” (The New York Times) Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world — conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. "Dazzling...An intimate, closely observed family portrait."—The New York Times "Hugely appealing."—People Magazine "An exquisitely detailed family saga."—Entertainment Weekly

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUL 7, 2003

One of the most anticipated books of the year, Lahiri's first novel (after 1999's Pulitzer Prize winning Interpreter of Maladies) amounts to less than the sum of its parts. Hopscotching across 25 years, it begins when newlyweds Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli emigrate to Cambridge, Mass., in 1968, where Ashima immediately gives birth to a son, Gogol a pet name that becomes permanent when his formal name, traditionally bestowed by the maternal grandmother, is posted in a letter from India, but lost in transit. Ashoke becomes a professor of engineering, but Ashima has a harder time assimilating, unwilling to give up her ties to India. A leap ahead to the '80s finds the teenage Gogol ashamed of his Indian heritage and his unusual name, which he sheds as he moves on to college at Yale and graduate school at Columbia, legally changing it to Nikhil. In one of the most telling chapters, Gogol moves into the home of a family of wealthy Manhattan WASPs and is initiated into a lifestyle idealized in Ralph Lauren ads. Here, Lahiri demonstrates her considerable powers of perception and her ability to convey the discomfort of feeling "other" in a world many would aspire to inhabit. After the death of Gogol's father interrupts this interlude, Lahiri again jumps ahead a year, quickly moving Gogol into marriage, divorce and a role as a dutiful if a bit guilt-stricken son. This small summary demonstrates what is most flawed about the novel: jarring pacing that leaves too many emotional voids between chapters. Lahiri offers a number of beautiful and moving tableaus, but these fail to coalesce into something more than a modest family saga. By any other writer, this would be hailed as a promising debut, but it fails to clear the exceedingly high bar set by her previous work.

Customer Reviews

Here thanks to english 100.

I read this book for a college course that I’m taking and I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did. It’s a great story about change and growing up. It’s a coming of age story that centralizes its focus on family. It started off as a chore to read, but quickly became something more! Worth a look!

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The Namesake Jhumpa Lahiri, 2003 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 304 pp. ISBN-13: 9780618485222 Summary Jhumpa Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller—the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail—the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase—that opens whole worlds of emotion . The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 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 publisher .)

Author Bio • Birth—July 11, 1967 • Where—London, England, UK • Raised—Kingston, Rhode Island, USA • Education—B.A., Barnard College; 2 M.A's., M.F.A., and Ph.D., Boston University • Awards—Pulitizer Prize ( see more below ) • Currently—lives in Rome, Italy Jhumpa Lahiri is an Indian American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name.She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna but goes by her nickname Jhumpa. Lahiri is a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by U.S. President Barack Obama. Biography Lahiri was born in London, the daughter of Indian immigrants from the state of West Bengal. Her family moved to the United States when she was two; Lahiri considers herself an American, having said, "I wasn't born here, but I might as well have been." Lahiri grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where her father Amar Lahiri works as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island; he is the basis for the protagonist in "The Third and Final Continent," the closing story from Interpreter of Maladies . Lahiri's mother wanted her children to grow up knowing their Bengali heritage, and her family often visited relatives in Calcutta (now Kolkata). When she began kindergarten in Kingston, Rhode Island, Lahiri's teacher decided to call her by her pet name, Jhumpa, because it was easier to pronounce than her "proper names". Lahiri recalled, "I always felt so embarrassed by my name.... You feel like you're causing someone pain just by being who you are." Lahiri's ambivalence over her identity was the inspiration for the ambivalence of Gogol, the protagonist of her novel The Namesake , over his unusual name. Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989. Lahiri then received multiple degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English, M.F.A. in Creative Writing, M.A. in Comparative Literature, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She took a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997–1998). Lahiri has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2001, Lahiri married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then Deputy Editor and now Senior Editor of Time Latin America . The couple lives in Rome, Italy with their two children. Literary career Lahiri's early short stories faced rejection from publishers "for years." Her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies , was finally released in 1999. The stories address sensitive dilemmas in the lives of Indians or Indian immigrants, with themes such as marital difficulties, miscarriages, and the disconnection between first and second generation United States immigrants. Lahiri later wrote,

When I first started writing I was not conscious that my subject was the Indian-American experience. What drew me to my craft was the desire to force the two worlds I occupied to mingle on the page as I was not brave enough, or mature enough, to allow in life .

The collection was praised by American critics, but received mixed reviews in India, where reviewers were alternately enthusiastic and upset Lahiri had "not paint[ed] Indians in a more positive light." However, according to Md. Ziaul Haque, a poet, columnist, scholar, researcher and a faculty member at Sylhet International University, Bangladesh,

But, it is really painful for any writer living far away in a new state, leaving his/her own homeland behind; the motherland, the environment, people, culture etc. constantly echo in the writer’s (and of course anybody else’s) mind. So, the manner of trying to imagine and describe about the motherland and its people deserves esteem. I think that we should coin a new term, i.e. “distant-author” and add it to Lahiri’s name since she, being a part of another country, has taken the help of "imagination" and depicted her India the way she has wanted to; the writer must have every possible right to paint the world the way he/she thinks appropriate .

Interpreter of Maladies sold 600,000 copies and received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (only the seventh time a story collection had won the award). In 2003, Lahiri published The Namesake , her first novel. The story spans over thirty years in the life of the Ganguli family. The Calcutta-born parents emigrated as young adults to the United States, where their children, Gogol and Sonia, grow up experiencing the constant generational and cultural gap with their parents. A film adaptation of The Namesake was released in 2007, directed by Mira Nair and starring Kal Penn as Gogol and Bollywood stars Tabu and Irrfan Khan as his parents. Lahiri herself made a cameo as "Aunt Jhumpa". Lahiri's second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth , was released in 2008. Upon its publication, Unaccustomed Earth achieved the rare distinction of debuting at number 1 on the New York Times best seller list. The Times Book Review editor, Dwight Garner, wrote, "It’s hard to remember the last genuinely serious, well-written work of fiction — particularly a book of stories — that leapt straight to No. 1; it’s a powerful demonstration of Lahiri’s newfound commercial clout." Her fourth book and second movel, The Lowland , was published in 2013, again to wide acclaim. The story of two Indian born brothers who take different paths in life, it was placed on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize. Lahiri has also had a distinguished relationship with The New Yorke r magazine in which she has published a number of her short stories, mostly fiction, and a few non-fiction including "The Long Way Home; Cooking Lessons," a story about the importance of food in Lahiri's relationship with her mother. Since 2005, Lahiri has been a Vice President of the PEN American Center, an organization designed to promote friendship and intellectual cooperation among writers. In 2010, she was appointed a member of the Committee on the Arts and Humanities, along with five others. Literary focus Lahiri's writing is characterized by her "plain" language and her characters, often Indian immigrants to America who must navigate between the cultural values of their homeland and their adopted home. Lahiri's fiction is autobiographical and frequently draws upon her own experiences as well as those of her parents, friends, acquaintances, and others in the Bengali communities with which she is familiar. Lahiri examines her characters' struggles, anxieties, and biases to chronicle the nuances and details of immigrant psychology and behavior. Unaccustomed Earth departs from this earlier original ethos as Lahiri's characters embark on new stages of development. These stories scrutinize the fate of the second and third generations. As succeeding generations become increasingly assimilated into American culture and are comfortable in constructing perspectives outside of their country of origin, Lahiri's fiction shifts to the needs of the individual. She shows how later generations depart from the constraints of their immigrant parents, who are often devoted to their community and their responsibility to other immigrants. Television Lahiri worked on the third season of the HBO television program In Treatment. That season featured a character named Sunil, a widower who moves to the United States from Bangladesh and struggles with grief and with culture shock. Although she is credited as a writer on these episodes, her role was more as a consultant on how a Bengali man might perceive Brooklyn. Awards • 1993 – TransAtlantic Award from the Henfield Foundation • 1999 – O. Henry Award for short story "Interpreter of Maladies" • 1999 – PEN/Hemingway Award (Best Fiction Debut of the Year) for "Interpreter of Maladies" • 1999 – "Interpreter of Maladies" selected as one of Best American Short Stories • 2000 – Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters • 2000 – "The Third and Final Continent" selected as one of Best American Short Stories • 2000 – The New Yorker 's Best Debut of the Year for "Interpreter of Maladies" • 2000 – Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut "Interpreter of Maladies" • 2002 – Guggenheim Fellowship • 2002 – "Nobody's Business" selected as one of Best American Short Stories • 2008 – Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for "Unaccustomed Earth" • 2009 – Asian American Literary Award for "Unaccustomed Earth"

( Author bio from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/12/13 .)

Book Reviews 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 - New York Times

This is a fine novel from a superb writer.... In the end, this quiet book makes a very large statement about courage, determination, and above all, the majestic ability of the human animal to endure and prosper. Christopher Tilghman - The Washington Post

[Jhumpa] Lahiri's deeply knowing, avidly descriptive, and luxuriously paced first novel is...triumphant.... [Her] Lahiri's keen and zealous attention as she painstakingly considers the viability of transplanted traditions, the many shades of otherness, and the lifelong work of defining and accepting oneself. Donna Seaman - Booklist

This first novel is an Indian American saga, covering several generations of the Ganguli family across three decades. Newlyweds Ashoke and Ashima leave India for the Boston area shortly after their traditional arranged marriage. The young husband, an engineering graduate student, is ready to be part of U.S. culture, but Ashima, disoriented and homesick, is less taken with late-Sixties America. She develops ties with other Bengali expatriates, forming lifelong friendships that help preserve the old ways in a new country. When the first Ganguli baby arrives, he is named Gogol in commemoration of a strange, life-saving encounter with the Russian writer's oeuvre. As Gogol matures, his unusual name proves to be a burden, though no more than the tensions and confusions of growing up as a first-generation American. This poignant treatment of the immigrant experience is a rich, stimulating fusion of authentic emotion, ironic observation, and revealing details. Readers who enjoyed the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies , will not be disappointed. Recommended for public and academic libraries. — Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA Library Journal

A first novel from Pulitzer-winner Lahiri (stories: Interpreter of Maladies , 1999) focuses on the divide between Indian immigrants and their Americanized children. The action takes place in and around Boston and New York between 1968 and 2000. As it begins, Ashoke Ganguli and his pregnant young wife Ashima are living in Cambridge while he does research at MIT. Their marriage was arranged in Calcutta: no problem. What is a problem is naming their son. Years before in India, a book by Gogol had saved Ashoke’s life in a train wreck, so he wants to name the boy Gogol. The matter becomes contentious and is hashed out at tedious length. Gogol grows to hate his name, and at 18 the Beatles-loving Yale freshman changes it officially to Nikhil. His father is now a professor outside Boston; his parents socialize exclusively with other middle-class Bengalis. The outward-looking Gogol, however, mixes easily with non-Indian Americans like his first girlfriend Ruth, another Yalie. Though Lahiri writes with painstaking care, her dry synoptic style fails to capture the quirkiness of relationships. Many scenes cry out for dialogue that would enable her characters to cut loose from a buttoned-down world in which much is documented but little revealed. After an unspecified quarrel, Ruth exits. Gogol goes to work as an architect in New York and meets Maxine, a book editor who seems his perfect match. Then his father dies unexpectedly—the kind of death that fills in for lack of plot—and he breaks up with Maxine, who like Ruth departs after a reported altercation (nothing verbatim). Girlfriend number three is an ultrasophisticated Indian academic with as little interest in Bengali culture as Gogol;these kindred spirits marry, but the restless Moushumi proves unfaithful. The ending finds the namesake alone, about to read the Russian Gogol for the first time. A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection. Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 1. The Namesake opens with Ashima Ganguli trying to make a spicy Indian snack from American ingredients—Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts—but "as usual, there's something missing." How does Ashima try and make over her home in Cambridge to remind her of what she's left behind in Calcutta? Throughout The Namesake , how does Jhumpa Lahiri use food and clothing to explore cultural transitions—especially through rituals, like the annaprasan, the rice ceremony? Some readers have said that Lahiri's writing makes them crave the meals she evokes so beautifully. What memories or desires does Lahiri bring up for you? Does her writing ever make you "hunger"?

2. The title The Namesake reflects the struggles Gogol Ganguli goes through to identify with his unusual names. How does Gogol lose first his public name, his bhalonam, and then his private pet name, his daknam? How does he try to remake his identity, after choosing to rename himself, and what is the result? How do our names precede us in society, and how do they define us? Do you have a pet name, or a secret name—and has that name ever become publicly known? Do you have different names with different people? Did you ever wish for a new name? How are names chosen in your family?

3. Newsweek said of Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies , "Jhumpa Lahiri writes such direct, translucent prose you almost forget you're reading." The Namesake is also subtle in style, elegant, and paced realistically. How are the events of the novel simultaneously dramatic and commonplace? What details made the characters real to you? Did you ever lose yourself in the story?

4. When Gogol is born, the Gangulis meet other Bengali families with small children, and Ashima finds with the new baby that "perfect strangers, all Americans, suddenly take notice of her, smiling, congratulating her for what she's done." How, for all of us, do children change our place in the community, and what we expect from it? Have you ever connected with someone you may have otherwise never spoken with—of a different ethnic background or economic class—through their children or your own?

5. In his youth, Ashoke Ganguli is saved from a massive train wreck in India. When his son Gogol is born, Ashoke thinks, "Being rescued from that shattered train had been the first miracle of his life. But here, now, reposing in his arms, weighing next to nothing but changing everything, is the second." Is Ashoke's love for his family more poignant because of his brush with death? Why do you think he hides his past from Gogol? What moments define us more—accidents or achievements, mourning or celebration?

6. Lahiri has said, "The question of identity is always a difficult one, but especially for those who are culturally displaced, as immigrants are...who grow up in two worlds simultaneously." What do you think Gogol wants most from his life? How is it different from what his family wants for him, and what they wanted when they first came to America to start a family? How have expectations changed between generations in your own family? Do you want something different for your own children from what your parents wanted for you?

7. Jhumpa Lahiri has said of The Namesake , "America is a real presence in the book; the characters must struggle and come to terms with what it means to live here, to be brought up here, to belong and not belong here." Did The Namesake allow you to think of America in a new way? Do you agree that "America is a real presence" in The Namesake ? How is India also a "presence" in the book?

8. The marriage of Ashima and Ashoke is arranged by their families. The closest intimacy they share before their wedding is when Ashima steps briefly, secretly, into Ashoke's shoes. Gogol's romantic encounters are very different from what his parents experienced or expected for their son. What draws Gogol to his many lovers, especially to Ruth, Maxine, and eventually Moushumi? What draws them to him? From where do you think we take our notions of romantic love—from our family and friends, or from society and the media? How much does your cultural heritage define your ideas and experience of love?

9. Lahiri explores in several ways the difficulty of reconciling cross-cultural rituals around death and dying. For instance, Ashima refuses to display the rubbings of gravestones young Gogol makes with his classmates. And when Gogol's father suddenly dies, Gogol's relationship with Maxine is strained and quickly ends. Why do you think their love affair can't survive Gogol's grief? How does the loss of Gogol's father turn him back toward his family? How does it also change Sonia and Ashima's relationship?

10. Did you find the ending of The Namesake surprising? What did you expect from Moushumi and Gogol's marriage? Do you think Moushumi is entirely to blame for her infidelity? Is Gogol a victim at the end of the book? In the last few pages of The Namesake , Gogol begins to read The Overcoat for the first time—the book his father gave him, by his "namesake." Where do you imagine Gogol will go from here? ( Questions issued by publisher .) top of page (summary)

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The Namesake: A Novel Paperback – June 4, 2019

Print length 336 pages
Language English
Publisher Mariner Books Classics
Publication date June 4, 2019
Reading age 14 years and up
Dimensions 5.5 x 0.81 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10 0358062683
ISBN-13 978-0358062684
Lexile measure 1140L
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This eagerly anticipated debut novel deftly expands on Lahiri's signature themes of love, solitude and cultural disorientation. Harper's Bazaar This poignant treatment of the immigrant experience is a rich, stimulating fusion of authentic emotion, ironic observation, and revealing details. Library Journal Lahiri's ... deeply knowing, avidly descriptive, and luxuriously paced first novel is equally triumphant [as Interpreter of Maladies]. Booklist, ALA Jhumpa Lahiri expands her Pulitzer Prize-winning short stories of Indian assimilation into her lovely first novel, THE NAMESAKE. Vanity Fair Lahiri weaves an intricate story of ... an Indian family in America. Their bumpy journey to self-acceptance will move you. Marie Claire [Lahiri] weaves an authentic tale of a Bengali family in Boston... [which] powerfully depicts the universal pull of family traditions. Lifetime The casual beauty of the writing keeps the pages turning. Elle ...immaculately written, seamlessly constructed novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of INTERPRETER OF MALADIES. Book Magazine ...remarkably assured first novel. Readers will find here the same elegant, deceptively simple prose that garnered so much praise for her short stories. Bookpage A debut novel that is as assured and eloquent as the work of a longtime master of the craft. The New York Times Gracefully written and filled with well-observed details. People Magazine ...far more authentic and lavishly imagines than many other young writers' best work. TimeOut New York Lahiri is insightful on the complexities of foreignness. Boston Magazine graceful and wonderfully specific prose...A Entertainment Weekly In the world of literature, Lahiri writes like a native. The San Francisco Chronicle generous, exacting portrait of the clash between cultural dictates and one man's heart. Boston Globe Astringent and clear-eyed in thought, vivid in its portraiture, attuned to American particulars and universal yearnings...memorable fiction. Newsday [Lahiri's] writing is assured and patient, inspiring immediate confidence that we are in trustworthy hands. The Los Angeles Times Achingly artful, Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel showcases her prodigious gifts. The Baltimore Sun Lahiri's inventive imagination and mellifluous prose makes her first novel simply wonderful...It's simply splendid. Providence Journal A fine novel from a superb writer The Washington Post A delicate, moving first novel. Time Magazine A debut novel that triumphs in its breadth and mastery. Star Ledger The novel not only proves the author's ease with the longer form but clearly demonstrates her artistic sensibility. News and Observer ...an accomplished novelist of the first rank, to whose further work we can look forward with confidence and excitement The San Diego Union-Tribune ...simple yet richly detailed writing that makes the heart ache as [Lahiri] meticulously unfolds the lives of her characters. USA Today A book to savor, certainly one of the best of the year. Atlanta Journal Constitution [An] exquisitely accomplished novel. San Jose Mercury News ...one of the best works of fiction published this year. The Seattle Times ...leaves its imprint through completely believable, well-drawn characters. Cleveland Plain Dealer a fascinating journey of self-discovery. The Miami Herald Emotionally charged and deeply poignant. Philadelphia Inquirer graceful and beautiful. San Antonio Express-News Lahiri's latest work doesn't disappoint. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel [The Namesake] speaks to the universal struggle to extricate ourselves from the past. Seattle Post-Intelligencer ...in this second book Lahiri's pace and accent a —

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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books Classics; Reprint edition (June 4, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0358062683
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0358062684
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 14 years and up
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1140L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.81 x 8.25 inches
#24 in Asian American Literature & Fiction
#32 in Cultural Heritage Fiction
#387 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Jhumpa lahiri.

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London and raised in Rhode Island. Her debut, internationally-bestselling collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, The New Yorker Debut of the Year award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was translated into twenty-nine languages. Her first novel, The Namesake, was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and selected as one of the best books of the year by USA Today and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Her second collection, Unaccustomed Earth, was a #1 New York Times bestseller; named a best book of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among others; and the recipient of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012.

Mira Nair (born 15 October 1957) is an Indian filmmaker based in New York. Her production company, Mirabai Films, specializes in films for international audiences on Indian society, whether in the economic, social or cultural spheres. Among her best known films are Mississippi Masala, The Namesake, the Golden Lion-winning Monsoon Wedding and Salaam Bombay!, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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Customers find the storyline great, realistic, and well-developed. They also say the emotional impact is soothing, moving, and wise. Customers describe the content as insightful and true. They praise the writing style as intricate, well-written, and not fantasized. Readers find the characters relatable and add to the complexity. However, some find the book boring and melancholy, while others say it's a fast read. Opinions are mixed on the pace, with some finding it fast and others saying it'll be a slow read.

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Customers find the storyline engaging, intelligent, touching, and pleasant to read. They also say the vivid imagery and symbolism woven together makes it easy to relate to Gogol and his family. Readers also say that the book presents a well developed conflict and resolution that helps them appreciate the family and friends they have in their lives.

"...It is a very moving and inspiration story that becomes very memorable. The language she uses to express her thoughts is very well crafted...." Read more

"...flair for storytelling and this is a book that really tells a very compelling and engaging account of one young man's experiences as an "ethnic Other..." Read more

"...I also love it because it just helps me appreciate the family and friends I have in my life to support me. This book is a must-read!" Read more

"...The novel reads like a nuanced family history , although it is mostly about Gogol, the Indian immigrant culture that shapes him, and his rebellion..." Read more

Customers find the writing style incredibly well written, descriptive, and easy to read. They also say the book gives a unique set of perspectives on the nervous condition of difference. Readers say the story is full of interesting insights into Indian culture and the life of Indian emigrants. They say the author has done an excellent job bringing the people and customs alive and that it makes for a good book club selection.

"...The author is very descriptive in her writing therefore allowing the reader to become completely immersed in the book...." Read more

"...Lahiri's writing is poetic and, almost excessively, descriptive . Every detail is cultivated and imbued with significance...." Read more

"...Highly recommend to othersAuthor has excellent writing style which keeps reader engaged in the book" Read more

"...I will say that this book was beautiful, descriptive , moving and intense...." Read more

Customers find the characters relatable, understood, and add to the complexity of the book.

"Well done, great characters and story Highly recommend to othersAuthor has excellent writing style which keeps reader engaged in the book" Read more

"...PROS: Beautifully written, with vivid depictions of characters and settings that feel true and authentic...." Read more

"...I found the places and characters beautifully drawn ." Read more

"...Gogol and all the characters are relatable , understood and add to the complexity we all have in our close and extended relationships...." Read more

Customers find the content insightful, wise, and entertaining. They also say the book entertains in a gentle, intelligent manner. Customers also say that the characters are relatable, understood, and add to the complexity of the story. They say the author uses her skills wisely in this novel, and has a keen eye for the universal human.

"...This is a book with a unique understanding of human decisions ." Read more

"...She uses her skills wisely in this novel, her keen eye for the Universal human condition aid her in painting a picture that is both specific, and..." Read more

"...Gogol and all the characters are relatable, understood and add to the complexity we all have in our close and extended relationships...." Read more

"...of perspectives on the nervous condition of difference, and does so with informed and likeable characters...." Read more

Customers find the characters and settings in the book touching, poignant, and sensitive. They also say the book is gripping, touching, sensitive, and moving.

"...I will say that this book was beautiful, descriptive, moving and intense...." Read more

"...written, with vivid depictions of characters and settings that feel true and authentic...." Read more

"...This story was remarkable an humbling. It was such a relaxing read ." Read more

"This is a touching and gripping account of the life of a boy born in America, to parents born in and strongly attached to India...." Read more

Customers find the book very easy to follow, hard to put down, and well written. They also say the story starts off simply but becomes complex in a non-confusing way.

"...It is very well-written, and clear to follow ...." Read more

"...It is also a pretty quick read, easy to finish in just a few long sittings...." Read more

"...The Namesake is a very easy and pleasant read, with vivid imagery and symbolism woven together, giving the readers a specific vision for each of the..." Read more

"...The story starts off simply, but becomes complex in a non-confusing way ...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the pace of the book. Some find it fast, while others say it's a little slow and tedious.

"...It is also a pretty quick read , easy to finish in just a few long sittings...." Read more

"...Also because the book starts off a little slow and might not keep the attention of younger readers but it does flow well and is easy to read." Read more

"...The need to find identity, love, fulfillment.the book is slow paced , more, bit the strain and tug of the main character in finding his way gives..." Read more

"This book is great. Fast paced , evocative, swirling through family and time." Read more

Customers find the book boring and disappointing, and say it didn't pull them in like other books.

"...I thought it was a bit too depressing and melancholy for my taste." Read more

"...My main criticism, though, is the truly melancholy feeling about Gogol's relationships - whether it's with his father, his mother, his love..." Read more

"...But the relationships in the book felt stilted ...." Read more

"...of a classic human story, well written and, for the most part, engaging . Not an amazing book, but a good one." Read more

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The Namesake: A Book Review

Monday, October 12, 2020

Pulitzer prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel, The Namesake , narrates three decades of the lives of Ashoke and Ashima Ganguly as they leave India and settle down in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1960’s.

Library Journal describes the novel as, “this poignant treatment of the immigrant experience, which is a rich, stimulating fusion of authentic emotion, ironic observation, and revealing details.” Booklist review says, “Lahiri's deeply knowing, avidly descriptive, and luxuriously paced first novel is equally triumphant as Interpreter of Maladies”

The newlyweds had an arranged marriage and now they must navigate life in a new land while still getting to know each other. Ashok is busy with his work at MIT and Ashima’s heart twinges with pangs of loneliness. She has an intense yearning for the people and the places she has left behind.

In the first chapter we see Ashima pregnant with her first child, craving a spicy Indian snack sold by street vendors on roadsides in Kolkata. She cannot find puffed rice, so she tries to recreate the snack using rice krispies cereal instead. Ashima feels that being a foreigner “is a sort of lifelong pregnancy -- a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts.''

Ashoke is a voracious reader, he reads while walking in crowded traffic too and his mother is convinced that he “would be hit by a bus or a tram, his nose deep in War and Peace. That he would be reading a book the moment he died” Her prophecy almost comes true as Ashoke is in a terrible train accident saved only because he was holding a copy of Nikolai Gogol’s book of short stories, pages of which fluttered and caught the attention of rescuers.

Ashoke names his son 'Gogol' as he realizes that “being rescued from that shattered train had been the first miracle of his life” and his baby “reposing in his arms” is the second.

Shakespeare’s quote, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” does not really hold true. A name is an integral part of our identity. For young Gogol, struggling between the crossroads of Indian and American cultures, the added complication of having a Russian name truly confounds him and adds to his awkwardness. When some classmates mispronounce his name as 'Giggle' or 'Gargle', it adds to his misery as well.

Ashima adapts to her new home and the friendship of fellow transplanted Bengalis in the foreign land helps her adjust to a new life. Gogol has a sister named Shonali aka Sonia who is his friend and partner in crime. The family assimilates while pursuing the American dream and celebrates Thanksgiving and Christmas while living in a decent suburb.

Ashoke is an introvert and as much as he loves his family, he is not expressive and does not reveal to Gogol the significant story behind his name until much later. As soon as Gogol turns eighteen, he changes his name to Nikhil and immediately feels liberated like a newer and freer person who has shed the weight of his old life.

Gogol studies architecture at Yale and then works as an architect in New York. He has three relationships, the first with Ruth, the second with Maxine and then he marries Moushumi. Gogol and Moushumi have always distanced themselves from their Indian roots, rejecting any plans to marry within their race. When they unexpectedly hit it off on their first meeting, they feel happy that they are ''fulfilling a collective, deep-seated desire'' on the part of their families. The love story of Gogol with each of the girls is beautifully described complete with how they meet, what draws them together, moments of love and passion and finally, heartbreak and disconnection.

I can completely identify with and relate to Ashima as my story is the same as hers. My husband and I had an arranged marriage too and we immigrated to America soon after. When she talks about her mother’s “salesmanship” in successfully ‘singing her praises’ to the groom’s family when their marriage was being arranged, when she remembers how the whole family came to the airport in India to wave them goodbye, I had familiar flashbacks from exactly similar experiences in my life.

My hometown Jamshedpur is mentioned twice in the novel and just seeing its name in print gave me a thrill. It is the city where Ashoke was headed to when he had his train accident. I have lived in Boston and I have lived in Kolkata for three years each and I love both of those cities.

Ashima goes on to work part time at a public library and her nick name is Monu. My name is Mona and I work in a public library too!

I could really connect to this book and my immersion in the character of Ashima was so complete that when an unexpected tragedy hits her, it upset me deeply. I had to close the book and put it down as I started crying uncontrollably. A little later, I resumed reading the book with a heavy heart.

There are thousands of Ashimas in America and on behalf of all of them I would like to thank Jhumpa Lahiri for creating this character, who in essence, is all of us.

This novel is not just a relatable read for immigrants, it is also an elegantly told family saga with universal themes; of love, of the profound relationship between a father and a son, of teenage angst, of feeling pulled by different worlds yet not completely belonging to either, of the unpredictability of life and relationships and of endings which are real and not always happily ever after.

Click on the book cover below to access this book in the Richland Library catalog.

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If you are interested in fiction from India do browse these booklists:

31 Outstanding Fiction Books by Indian Authors

Read a Book by a South Asian Author - India

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The snack craved by Ashima in the novel is called Jhal Muri. Jhal means spicy and muri is puffed rice. It is a concoction of dry roasted puffed rice, fried peanuts, diced boiled potatoes, diced - onions, green chillies, cilantro and tomatoes. A little mustard oil is added for a pungent kick along with pinches of salt, black salt, cumin powder and chilli powder. Some lemon juice is added at the end.

Puffed rice and mustard oil is available in Indian grocery stores. In India, this snack is sold by vendors on roadsides and trains. It is served in newspaper cones and that authentic taste is hard to replicate at home. For a more detailed recipe click on the link below.

Jhalmuri step by step video recipe

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Book Review

Adrienne Young
Adventure , Coming-of-Age , Fantasy

Picture of the book cover for the YA novel "Namesake."

Readability Age Range

12 to 18 years old
Wednesday Books
New York Times bestselling author

Year Published

Namesake follows up on the story of Fable (that began in the book of the same name ),the 17-year-old daughter of the most powerful trader in the Narrows. Fable has just found her way to freedom from her powerful father’s entanglements. She’s found a new ship, a new crew, a new love. But all that is short-lived when she’s soon kidnapped and becomes a pawn in a notorious thug’s scheme. And she must figure out how to get it all back.

Plot Summary

In the first book of this series, Fable , the story’s fiery-haired protagonist, had a lot to overcome. At 13, she had been abandoned on a horrible little island by her sea-trader father and left to fend for herself. And with hard work and determination she did just that. While fighting off thieves and cutthroats, she scrabbled her way to a berth on a ship called the Marigold.

Fable had somehow found a ship, a crew and a first love. And at the same time, she was finally able to disentangle herself from the long-reaching tentacles of her father, Saint, the most powerful and heartless trader in the Narrows.

But now, just as Fable has finally gotten a glimpse of true freedom and true love with a wonderful man named West, it’s all snatched away once more. She soon kidnapped by the thuggish Captain Zola, her father’s staunchest rival in the Narrows. She knows that she’s the cheese in some twisted mouse trap that Zola is scheming.

As the days pass and she gains information, however, Fable realizes that there’s so much more than just a rivalry with Saint in play with Zola’s conniving ploy. There are things about her beloved West that she never knew. Secrets of her deceased mother are in the mix, too. There are even ties to a powerful person named Holland, the greatest and most calculating gem trader in all of the port cities. And in some yet unknown way, everything leads back to her: a young nobody who owns, quite literally, nothing.

Fable is still in the dark, but one thing is sure: She needs to be listening carefully, thinking quickly and using whatever meager skills at her command to start making her own moves on the chessboard of happenings around her. Fable may not have a close relationship—or any relationship—with her powerful and brilliant father. But she’ll have to call upon every ounce of savvy she’s inherited from him to beat every one of these sea-going schemers at their own game.

Christian Beliefs

Other belief systems.

In this fantasy world, some sailors still believe in mythological creatures. But we see very little of that in this book. In fact, Fable’s sense of her mother’s spirit in one deep sea area—a sensation that is later determined to have been caused by something completely different—is the only real spiritual reference made.

Authority Roles

Fable’s hard-edged father is back and a bit more approachable this time. In fact, he and Fable find some common ground and even take steps to sacrifice for each other as they slowly rebuild something closer to what we might describe as a relationship. Fable’s mother, Isolde, is a key to this shift. As her secrets are revealed, Fable begins to more clearly understand the twisted world she’s a part of and why some decisions were made.

We find out that West, Fable’s love interest, is much more like Fable’s father than she ever realized. He’s kinder in some ways, but he’s also made deadly and far-less laudable choices that he fears will drive her away from him.

[ Spoiler Warning ] We eventually learn that the incredibly wealthy and powerful Holland is Fable’s grandmother whom she’d never met or known about. And she is a deviously calculating, powerful individual who’s used to snuffing out the life of anyone who gets in her way. She eventually offers to make Fable her heir, but only on her terms. And even when Fable is willing to walk away from all that wealth, Holland still manipulates the situation to her own benefit.

Profanity & Violence

A handful of profanities include the s-word as well as “b–tard,” “h—” and “a–.”

People drink the beer-like beverage Rye on occasion and in some cases get tipsy from it. A sparkling wine called Cava is consumed at a high society gathering.

The world of the Narrows is a dark and violent place. And this time around, we also visit the high-port city of Bastian—a much more cultured and polished metropolis that still masks its own deadliness.

A man is pulled out of a room and killed. We read about a small amount of blood trickling under a closed door. Fable watches as someone in a hammock above her is knifed and then carried up-deck to be thrown overboard. Fable also gets attacked by someone and nearly drowns underwater. The man rakes her leg across sharp coral while trying to strangle her. In another scene several people nearly drown when getting caught in the water during a quickly rising storm. Fable breaks the bones in another woman’s hand and then holds a knife on her.

West reveals his violent past to Fable. He tells her that as a 14-year-old, he strangled a man to death to protect his family. We’re also told that West hurt or killed people while in Saint’s service. And we hear of him attacking and setting fire to ships as he tries to rescue the kidnapped Fable. Throughout this high-seas adventure, a constant sense of peril hangs in the air around the various seaports.

Fable is manhandled and abused (though never sexually). At the very beginning of the story, she’s roughed up and knocked out by several men in a dark alley; she wakes bound with ropes to a masthead.

Sexual Content

Two of the male crewmates onboard the Marigold are a couple. They kiss once. This tale, however, is very much Fable’s romance, as well as an adventure. In the previous book, Fabel and twentysomething West became lovers. And during their earlier separation here, she thinks back on his scent and the feel of his skin. Upon reuniting, the pair embrace and kiss several times. And there is one lovemaking scene that lightly describes their nuzzling caresses. For the most part, though, the novel doesn’t look closely at any sexual interactions.

Discussion Topics

Get free discussion questions for other books at FocusOnTheFamily.com/discuss-books .

What do you think this story is saying about family? Which people in Fable’s life could actually claim that title? Fable is an older teen, but she’s still a teen. What did you think about her romance with the older West? What if the same kind of feelings popped up in your life, how would you handle them?

What lines did Fable cross that you might not? What do you think this book is saying about working through the scars and great losses in our lives? Do you think you could have done all Fable had to do?

Additional Comments

Like the first book in the series, Namesake is an immersive adventure with a likeable female lead. And it could easily be seen as a tale of female empowerment and intelligence working in a fictional world filled with the uber-powerful and the powerless. At the same time, Namesake ’s world is often dangerous and lawless. And the emotional choices made here, while fictional, aren’t always as morally well founded as some parents might want to promote or support. Fable is still a teen, but she’s making very adult decisions in every aspect of her life, including the area of her sexuality.

You can request a review of a title you can’t find at [email protected] .

Book reviews cover the content, themes and worldviews of fiction books, not necessarily their literary merit, and equip parents to decide whether a book is appropriate for their children. The inclusion of a book’s review does not constitute an endorsement by Focus on the Family.

Review by Bob Hoose

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Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel, THE NAMESAKE, begins with a recipe. In her small apartment kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ashima Ganguli is mixing together Rice Krispies, peanuts, diced onion, salt, lemon juice and chili peppers in "a humble approximation" of a snack she used to buy in Calcutta.

For Ashima, who is newly married and nine months pregnant, who misses her family and feels thoroughly alone in New England in the late 1960s, everything in America is "a humble approximation" of her life in India, which she left behind when she married Ashoke, an engineering student at MIT. For Lahiri, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her debut short story collection INTERPRETER OF MALADIES, this revelatory detail is typical: refined, effortless and graceful, it seems obvious only because it's so profound. The rest of the novel follows this tack, locating small truths and ironies in mundane, often overlooked objects like food and, as the title suggests, names.

While mixing her snack, Ashima goes into labor and the next day her first child is born --- it's a boy. Such a joyous occasion for Ashima and Ashoke is nonetheless complicated by the choice of names. Bengalis, Lahiri explains, have not one but two names --- a pet name used by family and friends, and a good name by which he or she is known to the world. "Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated," she says. "Good names tend to represent dignified and enlightened qualities" and appear on diplomas, awards and certificates.

Following Bengali custom, the choice of names is left to Ashima's aging grandmother, who posts a letter containing one name for a girl and another for a boy. But the letter never arrives and grasping for choices Ashoke chooses Gogol, a name with much greater significance than merely that of his favorite writer.

Lahiri introduces the Gangulis in such a way that it feels impossible not to be enticed into their world and demand to know their journeys, hardships and fates. After confidently setting these characters in motion, she traces their lives and the repercussions of Gogol's name through three decades, knowingly evoking the compromises and sacrifices they make to adjust to life in America. Throughout the novel, her prose is consistently somber and refined, subtle and subdued, but always pointed and revealing. Likewise the novel's pace arcs gracefully, a model of writerly patience.

But what makes THE NAMESAKE so enthralling and so richly readable is the care with which Lahiri recreates the ever-changing America where the Gangulis live. She populates her scenes and descriptions with a multitude of well-observed specifics --- at times far more details than necessary for verisimilitude, but never once threatening to overwhelm the story.

More crucially, Lahiri writes about Indian and American cultures with the same generosity of detail. She evokes the suburbia of Gogol's adolescence through his beloved Beatles albums and the Olan Mills school pictures as confidently as she describes his adulthood in New York through Ikea furniture and Dean & DeLuca gift baskets. Her descriptions of Ashima's painstaking preparations of mincemeat croquettes are as assured as her descriptions of spaghetti alla vongole at a dinner party.

Such a range of details may not seem overly significant, but Lahiri uses these differences in cultures and cuisines to keep the reader aware of the growing rift between these two worlds, of how far Gogol has moved from his origins and of how strongly those Bengali ties hold him in ways that he only gradually begins to realize.

Ultimately, there is something culinary about THE NAMESAKE, something complex, refined and robust in its blends of ingredients, something substantial and nourishing in its interplay of ideas and characters. This is a novel to savor, whose taste will linger in the reader's mind long after the last course is eaten, the dishes washed and put away, and the book placed aside on the shelf.

Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner on May 25, 2012

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Publication Date: December 11, 2006
Genres: Fiction
Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN-10: 0618733965
ISBN-13: 9780618733965

The Namesake

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Parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue to buy Neiman Marcus for $2.65 billion

FILE - This March, 11, 2009, file photo, shows the Neiman Marcus store in Dallas. Neiman Marcus, the 112-year-old storied luxury department store chain, is seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the first department store to be toppled by the coronavirus pandemic. As part of the bankruptcy filing, Neiman Marcus says it has secured $675 million in financing from creditors to keep operating during the restructuring, holding over two-thirds of the company’s debt. (AP Photo/Tom Pennington, File)

A Neiman Marcus sign is shown in San Francisco, Sunday, March 17, 2024. The parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue has signed a deal, Thursday, July 4, 2024, to buy upscale rival Neiman Marcus for $2.65 billion.(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

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FILE - Shoppers walk into the Neiman Marcus retail department store at NorthPark shopping center in Dallas, March 30, 2023. The parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue has signed a deal to buy upscale rival Neiman Marcus for $2.65 billion. The buyout was announced Thursday, July 4, 2024, after months of rumors that the department store chains had been negotiating a deal. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)

FILE — A Saks & Company doorman opens the 50th Street store entrance for customers, in New York, May 21, 1996. The parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue has signed a deal to buy upscale rival Neiman Marcus for $2.65 billion. The buyout was announced Thursday, July 4, 2024, after months of rumors that the department store chains had been negotiating a deal. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

NEW YORK (AP) — The parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue has signed a deal to buy upscale rival Neiman Marcus Group, which owns Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman stores, for $2.65 billion, with online behemoth Amazon holding a minority stake.

The new entity will be called Saks Global, creating a luxury powerhouse at a time when the arena has become increasingly fragmented with different players, from online marketplaces that sell luxury goods to upscale fashion and accessories brands opening up their own stores.

The new organization will comprise the Saks Fifth Avenue and Saks OFF 5TH brands, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman, as well as the real estate assets of Neiman Marcus Group and HBC, a holding company that purchased Saks in 2013.

The stores will continue to operate under their own brand names.

HBC has secured $1.15 billion in financing from investment funds and accounts managed by affiliates of Apollo, and a $2 billion fully committed revolving asset based loan facility from Bank of America, which is the lead underwriter, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, RBC Capital Markets, and Wells Fargo.

The deal was announced Thursday after the two department store chains had been in negotiations for about a year. But the twist is Amazon’s minority stake, which adds “a bit of spice” to an otherwise anticipated pact, according to Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, a research firm. Amazon will be working with Saks Global to offer its expertise in logistics and personalization technology. Salesforce, a cloud-based software powerhouse, will also become an investor at closing.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the impending deal Wednesday.

“For years, many in the industry have anticipated this transaction and the benefits it would drive for customers, partners and employees,” said Richard Baker, HBC executive chairman and CEO in a statement. “This is an exciting time in luxury retail, with technological advancements creating new opportunities to redefine the customer experience, and we look forward to unlocking significant value for our customers, brand partners and employees.”

Marc Metrick, who is CEO of Saks’ e-commerce business, will become CEO of Saks Global. He told The Associated Press on Thursday during a phone interview that consumers are increasingly demanding more access to designer product, easier ways to shop and more personalized experiences.

“This type of combination was the next move to make in order to put Saks, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman where they need to be for the consumer, ” he said.

Both Saks and Neiman Marcus have struggled as shoppers have been pulling back on buying high-end goods and shifting their spending toward experiences, like travel and upscale restaurants. The two iconic luxury purveyors have also faced stiffer competition from luxury brands, which are increasingly opening their own stores.

The deal should help reduce operating costs and create more negotiating power with vendors. The new entity will also give shoppers better access to more designers, particularly up-and-coming ones as it will have more financial flexibility. Shoppers will also see their experiences more personalized through improved use of artificial intelligence, Metrick said.

Saks Fifth Avenue currently operates 39 stores in the U.S., including its Manhattan flagship. In early 2021, Saks spun off its website into a separate company, with the hopes of expanding that business at a time when more people were shopping online.

Neiman Marcus filed for bankruptcy protection in May 2020 during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic but emerged in September of that year. Like many of its peers, the privately held department store chain was forced to temporarily close its stores for several months.

Meanwhile, other department stores are under pressure to keep increasing sales.

Storied Lord & Taylor announced in late August 2020 it was closing all its stores after filing for bankruptcy earlier that month. It’s operating online. Macy’s announced in February of this year that it will close 150 unproductive namesake stores over the next three years including 50 by year-end.

Consumers have proven resilient and willing to shop even after a bout of inflation, though behaviors have shifted, with some Americans trading down to lower-priced goods.

A deal between the two luxury retailers does not resolve all the issues, especially when high-end shoppers are looking to buy luxury goods online or at luxury brands’ own stores, Saunders said.

“As a larger entity, negotiating power will be a little better with the brands, but even a combined chain would not match the heft and power of the global luxury conglomerates, which would still hold most of the cards,” Saunders said. “As such, there is a risk that the deal might end up creating an even bigger headache for Saks.”

Saunders noted that Amazon’s stake in the business makes sense, as it has ambitions to play more heavily in the luxury arena. Saunders said Amazon could use its ability to streamline logistics and e-commerce and create an advantage for the new entity in a market where online shopping has become more important to shoppers — especially younger ones, which both chains need to do more to attract, he said.

Saks Global will also include HBC’s U.S. real estate assets and Neiman Marcus Group’s real estate assets, creating a $7 billion portfolio of retail real estate assets in top-tier luxury shopping destinations. Ian Putnam, currently president and CEO of HBC Properties and Investments, will become CEO of Saks Global Properties and Investments, which will manage the company’s portfolio of assets.

Both Metrick and Putnam will report to Baker, who will serve as executive chairman of Saks Global.

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“The Namesake” is Mira Nair ’s ninth feature, and I suspect the one closest to her heart. It tells the story of a young couple who have an arranged marriage in Calcutta and move to New York, where they discover each other and their new country, and have two children. Then the story shifts to center on their son, while keeping them in the picture. Nair, born in India, educated at Harvard, married to a Ugandan, must have felt a resonance on every page of her source, the beloved novel by Jhumpa Lahiri .

The first meeting of the young woman Ashima (Tabu) and her proposed husband Ashoke ( Irrfan Khan ) is filmed with subtle charm. Her prospective mother-in-law warns her that life will be hard in New York, far from home friends, family, all she knows. “Won’t he be there?” she asks shyly, and the solemn Ashoke smiles, and their future is sealed. Her new husband is an aspiring architect, earning enough at first to afford only a low-rent flat in a marginal neighborhood, but America has its consolations: “In this country, the gas is on 24 hours a day!” he tells her.

Nair tenderly handles their first days of warily walking and talking around each other, and tentatively making love. It goes easier than it might have, because this is a marriage that was arranged between the right two people, and their respect and regard (and eventually deep love) only grow.

Along comes a son, Gogol ( Kal Penn ), and a daughter, Sonia ( Sahira Nair , the director’s niece). Much is made of how Gogol got his name, which is not Indian or American but inspired by his father’s favorite author; as an adolescent the boy comes to hate it, and changes his name to Nikolai (or “Nicky”), Gogol’s own first name. But there is a reason for “Gogol,” and it has much importance for his father, who often mentions Gogol’s short story, “The Overcoat.” In that story, interestingly, the hero has a laughable name, which Gogol explains “happened quite as a case of necessity… it was utterly impossible to give him any other name.” How the American boy got his name becomes the stuff of family legend.

The movie concerns itself largely with being Indian and American at the same time. With making close ties with other Indian immigrants, sprinkling curry powder on the Rice Krispies, moving to a split-level suburban house, sending the children to college. Gogol, or Nicki, acquires a white girlfriend named Maxine (Jacinda Barrett), who apparently truly loves him but says the wrong things during a period of family mourning, so that Gogol shuts her out. Then he marries a Bengali girl named Moushumi ( Zuleikha Robinson ), who has grown much more sophisticated since he first met her years ago during negotiations between their parents. His sister daughter marries a nice white boy named Ben. “Times are changing,” Ashima philosophizes.

The culture gap is demonstrated when Gogol brings Maxine home to meet his parents, and warns her: “No kissing. No touching.” He has never even seen his own parents touch. But Maxine impulsively kisses his parents on their cheeks, and the earth does not move. They would prefer him to marry “a nice Bengali girl who makes somosas every Thursday,” as Moushumi describes herself, but the film reveals that the children of the second generation do not always follow the scripts of their parents.

The movie covers some 25 or 30 years, so it is episodic by nature. What holds it together are the subtle loving performances by Tabu and Khan, both Bollywoood stars. They never overplay, never spell out what can be said in a glance or a shrug, communicate great passion very quietly. As Gogol, Kal Penn is not a million miles removed from the character he played in “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle,” although he is a lot smarter. He is an angel until about 13, and then his parents, heaven help them, find they have given birth to an American teenager.

“The Namesake” tells a story that is the story of all immigrant groups in America: Parents of great daring arriving with dreams, children growing up in a way that makes them almost strangers, the old culture merging with the new. It has been said that all modern Russian literature came out of Gogol’s “Overcoat.” In the same way, all of us came out of the overcoat of this same immigrant experience.

Read “The Overcoat” at: www.geocities.com/short_stories_page/gogolovercoat.html

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

The Namesake (2006)

Rated PG-13

122 minutes

Kal Penn as Gogol

Tabu as Ashima

Irrfan Khan as Ashoke

Sahira Nair as Sonia

Jacinda Barrett as Maxine

Zuleikha Robinson as Moushumi

Glenne Headly as Lydia

Directed by

Photographed by.

Frederick Elmes

Based on the novel by

Jhumpa Lahiri

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THE NAMESAKE

by Jhumpa Lahiri ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 2003

A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.

A first novel from Pulitzer-winner Lahiri (stories: Interpreter of Maladies , 1999) focuses on the divide between Indian immigrants and their Americanized children.

The action takes place in and around Boston and New York between 1968 and 2000. As it begins, Ashoke Ganguli and his pregnant young wife Ashima are living in Cambridge while he does research at MIT. Their marriage was arranged in Calcutta: no problem. What is a problem is naming their son. Years before in India, a book by Gogol had saved Ashoke’s life in a train wreck, so he wants to name the boy Gogol. The matter becomes contentious and is hashed out at tedious length. Gogol grows to hate his name, and at 18 the Beatles-loving Yale freshman changes it officially to Nikhil. His father is now a professor outside Boston; his parents socialize exclusively with other middle-class Bengalis. The outward-looking Gogol, however, mixes easily with non-Indian Americans like his first girlfriend Ruth, another Yalie. Though Lahiri writes with painstaking care, her dry synoptic style fails to capture the quirkiness of relationships. Many scenes cry out for dialogue that would enable her characters to cut loose from a buttoned-down world in which much is documented but little revealed. After an unspecified quarrel, Ruth exits. Gogol goes to work as an architect in New York and meets Maxine, a book editor who seems his perfect match. Then his father dies unexpectedly—the kind of death that fills in for lack of plot—and he breaks up with Maxine, who like Ruth departs after a reported altercation (nothing verbatim). Girlfriend number three is an ultrasophisticated Indian academic with as little interest in Bengali culture as Gogol; these kindred spirits marry, but the restless Moushumi proves unfaithful. The ending finds the namesake alone, about to read the Russian Gogol for the first time.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003

ISBN: 0-395-92721-8

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003

LITERARY FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Jhumpa Lahiri ; translated by Jhumpa Lahiri with Todd Portnowitz

by Jhumpa Lahiri

by Domenico Starnone ; translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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Cross-Country Tripping

June 29, 2024

Jonathan Lethem; photo by Torkil Stavdal

This article is part of a regular series of conversations with the Review ’s contributors; read past ones here and sign up for our e-mail newsletter to get them delivered to your inbox each week.

“Charles Portis is anomalous,” Jonathan Lethem writes in our June 20 issue ; he is “force-fielded in a durable glamour of obscurity and frequently championed for revival—‘America’s most remembered forgotten novelist,’ as the writer Mark Dunbar quipped.” On the occasion of a new Library of America edition of Portis’s work, Lethem explores the full career of this brilliant, hilarious, yet self-effacing and often overlooked novelist, from his slim debut, Norwood (1966), through his most successful book, True Grit (1968), to his final masterpiece, Gringos (1991). All of them are driven, as Lethem puts it, by Portis’s “fixity of attention to how the world declines to make sense.”

Lethem himself is more than a little anomalous, a writer who for the past thirty years has skipped between genres and styles over the course of thirteen novels, five short-story collections, two novellas, and a variety of essays, songs, and edited volumes. His books have mixed noir and dystopian science fiction (as in his 1994 debut, Gun, with Occasional Music ), or bildungsroman and magical realism ( The Fortress of Solitude ), or spun out strange new versions of the historical novel ( Dissident Gardens ) or crime fiction ( Motherless Brooklyn ). His most recent book, Brooklyn Crime Novel , is only sort of what it says it is.

A few days ago, I e-mailed Lethem to ask him about Portis, science fiction, literary influence, and the joy of road trips.

Gabriel Winslow-Yost: I believe you’re currently driving across the country, which seems a perfect time to talk about Charles Portis. As you write in your essay, one of the most notable features of several of his characters is their “preoccupation with the maintenance of automobiles.” Do you ever find similar feelings coming on, as you drive?

Jonathan Lethem: I’m writing to you from the Redstart Roasters coffeeshop in Pittsburgh on day four of the drive, with two nights to go before I land in Maine. Our schedule is relatively relaxed today, between Pittsburgh and the Catskills, and we’ll likely pull over to look through a few book barns on the way.

It’s funny that you ask me to relate all the cars and driving in Portis to my own experience; such an obvious thought to have, and yet I’d never have had it. I grew up in New York City, which is the only place in the US, I think, where one doesn’t typically grow up with driving as a desire, and as a platform for mating and other coming-of-age rituals. My mother, who was from Queens, never drove. Of my three siblings, one doesn’t drive, the other only sporadically. I didn’t have a license until I was twenty-five. Yet I’ve now crisscrossed the length of the country enough times to lose count. I’m sort of addicted to it. The transfixing-boring road movie that always ends in a totally predictable surprise: I’m across the country! How did I do that? It helps that I have wonderful cousins to visit in the Midwest.

Even before I ever drove, I was in some sense connected to this resonance with road-tripping by proxy, through the archetypes in literature and cinema, just as I’d become interested in the desert west before I ever got there. This was the fault of Portis, but also Two-Lane Blacktop and Vanishing Point and Slither . I wrote fiction about cross-country tripping before I even had a license, though I did have my epic hitchhike to draw on .

But I still don’t identify with the car the way Portis does, and certainly not with repairing it. I can’t do more than jumpstart the engine or switch tires, and even those things only under duress. There’s a whole other level entailed in his work, the exalting of the grease-monkey tinkerer, making fixes on the fly with baling wire and duct tape, which roots Portis in a milieu where a lot of people have those capacities or envy them.

You mention that one of the first places you found Portis being taken seriously was among science fiction writers, despite his work being utterly un–science fictional. Why do you think he found so many fans in the sci-fi world, at a time when he had largely fallen out of print?

There’s a specific reason Portis endeared himself so deeply to science fiction writers, and that’s his fourth novel, Masters of Atlantis . The characters in that book comprise a population not unlike the ufologists, Dianeticists, and hollow-earthers who congregated with the fans and authors of written science fiction through most of the twentieth century. Portis lavishes them with a gentle skepticism, makes them familiar and silly and heartbreaking all at once—it’s an amazing accomplishment.

For the SF writers, savoring Portis’s affectionate debunking was a form of “the narcissism of minor difference,” since they so often found their professional convocations, and the letters columns of their fanzines, thronged by total and sincere crackpots. One of the biggest social rifts in the history of SF concerned whether or not to continue to publish Richard Shaver’s fiction in pulp magazines, once it was clear that Shaver, who wrote about an evil parallel race of humans living inside the hollow earth , not only promoted his stories as revealed fact, but claimed them as testimony from direct personal experience on the interior of our planet. Portis’s precise, delicate, and tongue-in-cheek way of narrating such legacies made the serious writers working in the genre feel embraced.

Apart from that, Portis is an irresistible writer’s writer. Who wouldn’t latch onto him as a favorite?

Do you think Portis has had much influence on your own writing? Or have you consciously drawn on his example in any of your books? I remember thinking that The Feral Detective had a pleasing Portis-ish tone.

I’m tempted to read this question as a kind of a speed trap. I’ve been zipping along happily on the Flattering Implicit Comparison Freeway, and you’ve just tempted me into an explicit self-comparison to one of the funniest writers ever, and a total narrative “natural.” Sure, I’d like to think that The Feral Detective and Amnesia Moon , my two most “road movie” books, both swig from the Portis jug here and there. My tomboy in Girl in Landscape has a little Mattie Ross to her. And some of the Chronic City conspiracies might have arrived by detour through his Masters of Atlantis . But even as we speak, I’ve now pulled over onto the shoulder of this metaphor and can see the cop strolling up in my rear-view, scribbling to loosen the ink in his ball-point pen.

Now that Portis is safe in the Library of America, who’s next? Who is the current greatest underappreciated writer in need of enshrinement?

You mean it’s up to us? Samuel R. Delany, Samuel R. Delany, Samuel R. Delany.

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Jonathan Lethem’s latest book is Brooklyn Crime Novel . He is the Roy Edward Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona. (June 2024)

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New york liberty at connecticut sun odds, picks and predictions, share this article.

The New York Liberty (17-4) and Connecticut Sun (17-4) meet Wednesday afternoon at Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn. Tip-off is scheduled for 11 a.m. ET. Let’s analyze FanDuel Sportsbook’s lines around the Liberty vs. Sun odds , and make our expert WNBA picks and predictions .

Season series: Liberty lead 1-0

The Liberty picked up an 82-75 home win against the Sun June 8, cashing as 2.5-point favorites with the Over (154) hitting in their 1st regular-season meeting.

Last season, New York won all 4 regular-season meetings vs. Connecticut, while going 3-1 against the spread (ATS) with the Over/Under splitting 2-2.

In the postseason, the Liberty rebounded from a Game 1 loss to win a best-of-5 semifinal series in 4 games vs. the Sun — though Connecticut covered 3 of the 4 playoff battles.

New York is coming off an 83-78 loss as a 10.5-point favorite at the Indiana Fever Saturday, snapping a 5-game win streak. The Liberty are a dismal 2-5 ATS in the past 7 games, while the Under has cashed in 3 in a row.

Connecticut won 80-67 against the visiting Atlanta Dream Sunday, but it just missed the cover as a 14-point favorite. The Sun have won 3 in a row, but it is just 4-3 in the past 7 games, while going 2-6 ATS in the previous 8 contests. The Under has hit in 3 in a row, and 7 of the past 9 contests.

Liberty at Sun odds

Provided by FanDuel Sportsbook ; access USA TODAY Sports Scores and Sports Betting Odds hub for a full list. Lines last updated at 2:46 a.m. ET.

Moneyline (ML) : Liberty -158 (bet $158 to win $100) | Sun +128 (bet $100 to win $128)
Against the spread : Liberty -2.5 (-112) | Sun +2.5 (-108)
Over/Under (O/U) : 156.5 (O: -114 | U: -106)

Liberty at Sun picks and predictions

Sun 79, Liberty 75

CONNECTICUT (+ 128 ) is a solid moderate underdog on its home court against New York (-158).

Yes, the Liberty has dominated this series lately, winning 8 of the past 9 head-to-head battles, including in 5 straight trips to Connecticut. However, the Sun enter this crucial showdown with 3 straight wins, including impressive victories at the Phoenix Mercury and Minnesota Lynx last week.

Against the spread

Connecticut +2.5 (-108) is worth a look catching the little bit of points if you are a bit on the conservative side and don’t want to bet the moneyline. However, the better value is playing the Sun straight up, and by no means should you play both ends together.

UNDER 156.5 ( -106 ) is a solid play in this clash for the top overall spot in the W.

The Under has cashed in 3 straight regular-season games for Connecticut, while going 7-3 in the past 10 outings. At home, the Sun have cashed Unders in 2 of the past 3.

For the Liberty, they enter play with 3 consecutive Under results, while the Under is 6-3 in the past 9 outings on the road. However, the 1st head-to-head battle in Connecticut teams went Over, so be careful, and go lightly.

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For more sports betting picks and tips , check out SportsbookWire.com and BetFTW .

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Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese (5) looks to shoot the ball while being guarded by Indiana Fever forward Katie Lou Samuelson (33) during a WNBA game at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.

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A Debut Novel That Skewers Capitalism, One Scalped Birkin at a Time

In Yasmin Zaher’s “The Coin,” a rich, chic Palestinian schoolteacher in New York City grapples with displacement and American consumerism.

Share full article

The cover of “The Coin” is bright yellow with black type. In the center is a photo of a headless woman wearing a trench coat and snake-print stilettos. She appears to be dancing, with one arm and leg reaching high into the air.

By Lauren Christensen

Lauren Christensen is an editor at the Book Review.

THE COIN , by Yasmin Zaher

Halfway through Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel, “The Coin,” the unnamed narrator, a Palestinian schoolteacher in New York City, arrives at the Hermès flagship store on Paris’s Rue Saint-Honoré to buy a Birkin.

“Every year, regardless of poverty, war or famine, the price of the Birkin bag increases,” she explains. “Its value is more solid than gold or the S&P 500, and the luxury house of Hermès has achieved this by only selling to a very small and particular group of people .”

She already has one, a larger size in black, inherited from her mother, who died in a car crash in Palestine, along with her father. (He, in turn, left her millions of dollars that she cannot access except by allowance from her patronizing older brother.) She’s here to purchase another as part of a mission concocted by her homeless grifter situationship, a man she simply calls Trenchcoat, to buy Birkins and “sell them at a premium to the trashy and unworthy.” Like if Robin Hood stole status from the rich to give to the poorly dressed.

What does this high-end accessories market have to do with the narrator’s dream about the fatal shooting of the 12-year-old Gazan Muhammad al-Durrah in 2000, at the start of the second intifada? Or with her own rootlessness, her parentless exile from a place in which her family had already been exiled for generations? Zaher’s smart, sneering novel of capital and its consequences answers: Everything.

It is sometime after 2016 and the narrator has recently left Palestine, able to “get out” thanks to the rich Russian boyfriend she’s kind of cheating on with Trenchcoat. She carries her Birkin to her teaching job along with a CVS shopping basket filled with supplies for her Sisyphean campaign to stay clean in a city that — unlike her hygienic, upper-class Palestinian milieu — “embraced the dirt like it was an aesthetic.”

In a spiraling, hallucinogenic plot, “The Coin” draws a dotted line between the narrator’s grandmother’s garden in Palestine and a splatter of excrement on New York City subway tiles; between her grandfather’s birthplace of Bisan — “now a low-income town in Israel, housing mostly Jewish families from Morocco and no Palestinians” — Stokely Carmichael and a Gucci window display appropriating the language of revolution (“Liberté! Égalité! Sexualité!”).

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Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity from "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." (The New York Times) Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of ...
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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 ...
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations. Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity from "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." (The New York Times) Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from ...
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The Namesake: A Book Review. Pulitzer prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel, The Namesake, narrates three decades of the lives of Ashoke and Ashima Ganguly as they leave India and settle down in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1960's. Library Journal describes the novel as, "this poignant treatment of the immigrant experience ...
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Book Review Namesake follows up on the story of Fable (that began in the book of the same name ),the 17-year-old daughter of the most powerful trader in the Narrows. Fable has just found her way to freedom from her powerful father's entanglements. She's found a new ship, a new crew, a new love.
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Yet I've now crisscrossed the length of the country enough times to lose count. I'm sort of addicted to it. The transfixing-boring road movie that always ends in a totally predictable surprise: I'm across the country! ... Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest. Email Address. Continue. Submit a letter ...
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Book Review: 'The Coin,' by Yasmin Zaher
In Yasmin Zaher's "The Coin," a rich, chic Palestinian schoolteacher in New York City grapples with displacement and American consumerism.

Book Review: Namesake by Adrienne Young

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