If you like to read about Indian food, you might like this book, but if you want a well-told story or engaging characters, then look elsewhere. Talk about a book bogging down, this one has no story to bog down. It's as dry and brittle as dead leaves at the end on October but not nearly as pretty.

I like slower paced novels but I do demand some story and THE NAMESAKE simply had none. It seemed to have been written solely for the sake of name-dropping rather than to tell a tale. I didn't like Lahiri's short stories (INTERPRETER OF MALADIES) but at least they had some substance. This book has none.

If you want to read good Indian literature, try THE BLUE BEDSPREAD and if you want superlative Indian literature, read anything written by Rohinton Mistry, especially FAMILY MATTERS. Avoid THE NAMESAKE, but if you must read it, then check it out of the library. Don't ever pay for it. Will it stand the test of time? I think not.


Didn't keep my interest   August 21, 2004
 14 out of 17 found this review helpful

Maybe this book should have been half as long. By the end of the book, I really had no interest in what Gogol was thinking or doing. The initial descriptions of the Ganguli family's struggles to adapt to life in the United States was interesting both between generations and genders. I particularly liked the food adaptions. I felt more sympathy for Gogol's parents and their struggles than for him.

For those readers interested in a book for young people about a young girl and her family from India and her cultural adaption to Iowa, I recommend Blue Jasmine by Kashmira Sheth.


atmospheric detail but shallow inner lives   January 2, 2005
 14 out of 16 found this review helpful

I closed this book and exclaimed, "What a disappointment!" Ms. Lahiri's book of short stories was simply outstanding. To give her and "The Namesake" its due, this book is well-written and the characters of Gogol and his parents, Asoke and Ashima, are well-developed, and Ms. Lahiri is great at atmospheric detail. However, the book is like a story without a meaning or a point - that may be OK in short stories but in a novel it should be suicidal. Granted, you needn't write with a meaning or to have a point, but it is sad to see so little inner life and reflection in her characters, especially in Gogol who is 32 years old by the end of the book... He has been through three extended romances and affairs including one failed marriage. The way that he and Moushoumi slip so easily in and out of bed with others, i.e. how they sleep around, I find not to be representative of or a norm in second generation Indian American life. So much sex and never an an unintended pregnancy!... But I return, what is really disappointing is how shallow and superficial the inner life of Gogol is, something I don't feel is representative of people born between two cultures and two worlds...


the namesake   September 24, 2003
 13 out of 26 found this review helpful

i gave up after the first 100 pages.lahiri should stick to the short story genre. the characters in the novel are bland and never come alive. after 1/3 of the book I really didn't care whether the protagonist liked his name or not. He is an unbelievable bore.
a reader from massachusetts


"Out of Gogol's overcoat"   September 26, 2003
 13 out of 17 found this review helpful

With her 1999 collection of short stories, INTERPRETER OF MALADIES, Pulitzer-Prize winning writer, Jhumpa Lahiri, proved her talent for storytelling and keen eye for detail. She demonstrates those same abilities again in her poignant first novel, THE NAMESAKE. Lahiri's book follows the thirty-two year journey of its protagonost, Gogol Ganguli, from his birth to Bengali-American parents in 1968, to a transitional moment in his life in 2000, and ultimately to his self-acceptance. Along the way, and always at odds with Indian-American culture, Lahiri's character changes the given name he hates from Gogol to Nikhil, suffers the death of his academic father, studies architecture at Yale and Columbia, marries Moushumi, an American-Bengali woman, and then encounters divorce. The point of Lahiri's compelling novel is not so much about the significance of one's name--"There's no such thing as a perfect name," Gogol recognizes at one point in his life (p. 145)--as it is about attempting to accept, interpret, and comprehend the events in our lives that shape us into who we are (p. 187). Although short in length, Lahiri serves up much food for thought in THE NAMESAKE.

G. Merritt