The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

So I found this the weekend school started. For everyone but me, that is. I've got free time now, and can read what I want. And Amazon kept pushing it, and I happened to see it in hardback at my favorite used bookstore. Then I needed something to keep my mind busy one weekend and pulled it off the shelf.

It's a generational story, and one about displacement. The book follows a newly married couple moves from India to Massachusetts, then continues with the lives of their children. It has a lot of interesting things to say about family and identity, about love and duty. There's parts that I relate to about building your own family community when yours is not near. It has a good lyrical style, and I really liked that the narrative thread and voice moved among family members. Each perspective came through - better, it was interesting to see how these perspectives were formed.

"She passes over two pages filled only with the addresses of her daughter, and then her son. She has given birth to vagabonds. She is the keeper of all of these names and numbers now, numbers she once knew by heart, numbers and addresses her children no longer remember. she thinks of all the dark hot apartments Gogol has inhabited over the years, beginning with his first dorm room in New Haven, and now the apartment in Manhattan with the peeling radiator and cracks in the walls. Sonia has done the same as her brother, a new room every year ever since she was eighteen, new roommates Ashima must keep track of when she calls. She thinks of her husband's apartment in Cleveland, which she had helped him settle into one weekend when she visited. She'd bought him inexpensive pots and plates, the kind she used back in Cambridge, as opposed to the gleaming ones from Williams-Sonoma her children buy for her these days as gifts. Sheets and towels, some sheer curtains for the windows, a big sack of rice. In her own life Ashima has lived in only five houses: her parents' flat in Calcutta, her in-laws house for one month, the house they rented in Cambridge, living below the Montgomerys, the faculty apatment on campus, and lastly, the one they own now. One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist."