And, though he can't ignore a deep-rooted sense that he has somehow betrayed his parents, "It is as Nikhil. He makes an official, legal change to Nikhil and is relieved when college friends - and, more importantly, girlfriends - don't question it. Almost two decades later, Gogol is finding his strange name - neither Bengali nor American - a burden, an embarrassment and a bore. So when he and his wife have a baby boy and need a temporary "petname" while they wait for the "good" one (Ashima's elderly grandmother is sending her choice via airmail) they alight on "Gogol" as a sufficiently noble, if quirky, compromise.īut the grandmother expires before she can name the child, and "Nikhil" - which the parents are forced to choose in a hurry for an official document - never properly sticks. In the months of pain and injury that follow, both author and book take on a peculiar significance. He is pulled from the wreckage with a much-loved copy of Gogol's The Overcoat in his pocket. Our hero's father is only a young man when he survives a near-fatal train crash.
It's there in the title, though it's absolutely not the reason you read on. The Namesake simply spans the first three decades of a young man's life - but it would be misleading to suggest there isn't a theme of sorts running through it. This is Jhumpa Lahiri's achievement in her fantastically readable, warm and profound first novel. And then, having mixed it all nicely, make your reader care so fiercely and ardently that they laugh, weep, hold their breath and can barely bring themselves to put the novel down. And write it all in a third person present tense which, with guileless vocabulary and an appealing lack of stylisation, somehow conjures a bleak, arm's-length mood, a sense of a life spooling inevitably on. Punctuate gently with a clutch of standard human-condition events and tragedies - first loves, sudden heart attacks, anguished long-distance phone calls, divorces, nothing more dramatic than that.
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