The Namesake

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TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. The father has picked the temporary name Gogol because he owes his life to the fact that he was sitting close to a window reading Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ when a train he was traveling on crashed, and therefore escaped. One of the Gangulis’ Bengali customs is hosting house parties for all of their Bengali American friends. After waiting hurriedly for Gogol’s delayed Amtrak train, one holiday weekend, Ashoke tells his son about the train-wreck that nearly killed him, and that gave Gogol his name. It explores many of the same emotional and cultural themes as Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies.

This change in name and Gogol's going to Yale, rather than following his father's footsteps to MIT, sets up the barriers between Gogol and his family. When Gogol goes to Yale it's 1982, so we learn about his first adventures with girls, alcohol and pot. When Ashoke Ganguli survives a catastrophic train accident in India thanks to a book of short stories written by Nikolai Gogol, he decides to move to America. It is only when Ashoke dies suddenly that Ashima begins to learn a new identity, that of a widow, albeit one surrounded by a loving and supportive family. The ringtone from Moushumi's mobile phone is the song "Riviera Rendezvous" by Ursula 1000 from the album Kinda' Kinky; this is the same song that is played when Gogol and Moushumi first sleep together.Moushumi knew Gogol when he was a young boy, and the two are set up on a blind date, in New York, by their parents. The reader follows him through adolescence into adulthood where his history and his family affect his relationships with women more than anything else. The story becomes almost like a diary - with much everyday filler, many simple events, many instances of telling and not showing, and not enough payoff - at least for me.

Both choose career paths that are not traditionally Indian so that they have little contact with the Bengali culture that their parents fought so hard to preserve. As he grows, Gogol comes to hate his name and decides to change it, hoping to leave both his former name and his Bengali heritage behind. He was discovered by the rescue party because of the blowing pages of the book he had been reading when the train derailed—a copy of The Collected Stories of Nikolai Gogol. I'm impressed with how thoroughly the author sticks to the name theme of the title all through the book. She lives with her parents downtown, in a beautiful townhouse, and shares their intellectual, cosmopolitan life.E da qui, perciò, il destino nel nome (che è il titolo italiano del film del 2006 diretto da Mira Nair basato su questo romanzo). It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. The Indian classical pieces (performed on screen by Tabu) were sung by Mitali Banerjee Bhawmik, a New Jersey-based musician. During his college years, he smokes cigarettes and marijuana, goes to many parties, and loses his virginity to a girl he cannot remember.