The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri, 2003
Contemporary fiction Literary fiction
A story of a young man navigating family expectations, cultural dissonance, and the complicated legacy of migration.
Feels like melancholy, longing and nostalgia. About identity, family and freedom.
A page from the book
The strange parallels between waiting for a child and waiting for belonging.
Though no longer pregnant, she continues, at times, to mix Rice Krispies and peanuts and onions in a bowl. For being a foreigner Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy — a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity of from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect. Jhumpa Lahiri.Lahiri’s family originated from Kolkata, India. Her writing often explores the friction between traditional South Asian customs and modern American life.
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Questions readers ask
- What is The Namesake like?
- Feels like melancholy, longing and nostalgia. About identity, family and freedom.
- What should I read after The Namesake?
- If you liked The Namesake, try The Vanishing Half (Brit Bennett), Dark Matter (Blake Crouch) and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Díaz).
A taste of the feed
The moment your routine life becomes fundamentally precarious.
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Dark Matter · Blake Crouch
What if a curse arrived in the Caribbean on the screams of the enslaved?
They say it came first from Africa, carried on the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao · Junot Díaz
The one day a year when everything you're missing becomes impossible to ignore.
My birthday is the one day of the year that we’re both most acutely aware of my illness. It’s the acknowledging of the passage of time that does it. Another whole year of being sick, no hope for a cure on the horizon. Another year of missing all the normal teenagery things—learner’s permit, first kiss, prom, first heartbreak, first fender bender. Another year of my mom doing nothing but working and taking care of me. Every other day these omissions are easy—easier, at least—to ignore.
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