The Namesake
Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli are newlyweds when they arrive in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1968, an arranged Bengali couple far from the world that knew them. Their first child, born in a Boston hospital before the family elder's letter naming him can arrive, is registered with a placeholder Russian name his father loves: Gogol. The novel follows Gogol from his American childhood in suburban Massachusetts through architecture school at Yale and into a series of relationships, marriages, and quiet failures, all of them shadowed by the name he keeps trying to outgrow and the father he keeps not quite understanding. Jhumpa Lahiri's debut novel, published in 2003, traces two generations of one Bengali American family across forty years, observing in her characteristically exact prose the small accommodations and inheritances of immigrant life and the price each member pays for moving between two countries that never quite become home.
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Newly arrived from Calcutta, Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli have their first child in 1968 Boston and write the pet name Gogol on his birth certificate. The novel follows Gogol from a Massachusetts suburban childhood through Yale, an architecture practice in New York, and the slow weight of his name.
Yes. Mira Nair directed a 2006 film adaptation starring Kal Penn and Tabu. The film follows the novel's intergenerational immigrant story closely. Jhumpa Lahiri's father makes a cameo appearance.
Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 for her debut story collection Interpreter of Maladies. The Namesake (2003), her first novel, was a New York Times Notable Book.
The Namesake was written by Jhumpa Lahiri, published in 2003 by Houghton Mifflin.
The Namesake is 301 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Namesake takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Namesake is a standalone novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, not part of a series.
The Namesake is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.