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Derailments |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Linda Simon |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/2004 |
| Size: 2,462 Words, 14,976 Characters |
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THE NAMESAKE
Jhumpa Lahiri
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003
291 pp., $24.00
Jhumpa Lahiri's first book, a collection of short stories titled Interpreter of Maladies, met with acclaim when it was published in 1999, winning a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a PEN/Hemingway Award, and an American Academy of Arts & Letters Metcalf Award. The stories, set in India and America, considered the connection of place and identity, particularly the identity of the immigrant who becomes more or less assimilated into a new world, more or less distanced from his native land. The Namesake continues that theme of identity, complicating it with questions about cultural disorientation, loyalty to one's personal and national heritage, and the significance of traditions, family, and, most essentially, one's very name. It is a book about possibility and loss, elegantly and delicately written, and, as Lahiri has admitted in interviews, about themes deeply and personally felt.
Although she grew up in Rhode Island, Lahiri has an intimate connection to the immigrant experience. She was born in London to immigrant parents who brought her to the United States when she was five. Like Gogol, the central character of her novel, throughout her childhood Lahiri spent months at a time in Calcutta to visit her large extended family. In India, though, she was not a tourist and, unlike her parents, not coming to her home. This unusual perspective, she says, gave her a "necessary combination of distance an...
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..., all that was inevitable about the world." For Ashoke as for his son, living in a new culture was both inevitable and, in different ways, irrational. It required fortitude and an emotional agility that often was hard to muster; it required patience and equanimity; it required the ability to live with a divided soul and to make peace, as far as possible, with a deep and haunting sense of loss.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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