Book Club: The Namesake

Join us for coffee, conversation, and community as we discuss Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri's bestseller The Namesake on Wednesday, October 29 at 1:00pm. Deemed "quietly dazzling" by The New York Times when it was first released in 2003, The Namesake is a modern classic about the struggles of assimilation and what it's like to come of age caught between two opposing cultures. Available wherever books are sold and from the Free Library of Philadelphia.

The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.

Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.

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