How It Begins

For my second commentary on a passage from The Namesake, I'm choosing the very start of the book. As I mulled over various parts of the novel, I kept coming back to the first pages, because they're a great example of Lahiri's skill at narrative, characterization, setting.

On a sticky August evening [in 1968] two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chili pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the mix. Ashima has been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout India, spilling from newspaper cones. Even now that there is barely space inside her, it is the one thing she craves.

"On a sticky August evening..." Lahiri puts us there immediately. Everyone knows what a "sticky August evening" feels like. And when she tells us it's two weeks before her due date, we feel tension. We know something's going to happen. And the snack Ashima makes isn't just about the odd cravings of pregnancy: Rice Krispies, Planters peanuts, chili peppers.... It's the best substitute she can devise for a common Indian snack food, and it's emblematic of her life. She's adapting to living in America as best she can, but India is where she wants to be. She can barely take in food anymore, but she still wants this snack. She literally hungers for India. On this very first page, Lahiri establishes the conflict and yearning that's at the heart of Ahsima's adult life.

Then Lahiri takes us further into the discomfort of the August night—and of pregnancy:

She wipes sweat from her face with the free end of her sari. Her swollen feet ache against gray speckled linoleum. Her pelvis aches from the baby's weight...a curious warmth floods her abdomen, followed by a tightening so severe, she doubles over, gasping without sound, dropping the onion with a thud on the floor....

The reader empathizes with Ashima now, especially if the reader is a woman who's ever had a baby. The reader knows what Ashima is feeling in her own body. And as if Lahiri hasn't done enough to grab the reader, she ratchets everything up a notch by taking the reader into Ahsima's very alien consciousness—alien at any rate to non-Bengali readers:

She calls out to her husband, Ashoke...[but] she doesn't say his name. Ashima never thinks of her husband's name when she thinks of her husband, even though she knows perfectly well what it is. She has adopted his surname, but refuses, for propriety's sake, to utter his first. It's not the type of thing Bengali wives do. Like a kiss or a caress in a Hindi movie, a husband's name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over. And so, instead of saying Ashoke's name, she utters the interrogative that has come to replace it, which translates roughly as, "Are you listening to me?"

The baby Ashima is about to have is going to be born in Massachusetts. He or she will be an American. This kid will watch The Muppet Show and Schoolhouse Rock, listen to Fleetwood Mac and eat Snicker's bars. And this is his mother, a woman whose culture doesn't allow her to say her husband's name, who will never stop longing for a country on the other side of the world.

Generation gap doesn't begin to describe the gulf waiting to open between this child and his parents.

The Namesake: The Movie

Join us tonight at the Main Library, 79 Highland Ave., at 6:30 for a screening of The Namesake, the 2006 screen adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's award-winning novel.

Kal Penn (of House and the Harold and Kumar movies) plays the title role, Gogol Ganguli.

The film appeared on several critics' lists of top films of the year, incuding the top ten lists of The Christian Science Monitor's Peter Rainer, The Philadelphia Inquirer's Carrie Rickey, and USA Today's Claudia Puig.

Join Us Tonight

At 7 p.m. at the Central Library, Tufts English professor Neil Miller will lead a group discussion of The Namesake. Miller is the award-winning author of six books, including Sex-Crime Panic and Banned in Boston: The Watch and Ward Society's Crusade Against Books, Burlesque, and the Social Evil.

The Namesake is a wonderful book that evokes strong reactions from readers, so it's sure to be a great talk!

Like Anyone Else, Only More So

From time to time during the next month I will be posting passages from The Namesake that illustrate what a wonderful book this is. In the fifth chapter, Gogol Ganguli, the thoroughly American son of the still very Bengali Ashima and Ashoke, is about to begin college. And for this new phase of his life he wants a new name. He's always hated being called "Gogol," and his father Ashoke has never fully explained the importance of the name. In addition to being his favorite writer, Ashoke credits Gogol with saving his life. Back in India long before Gogol's birth, Ashoke had been traveling to see his grandparents when his train derailed. The rescue team might never have found Ashoke, his pelvis and right leg broken, trapped inside the overturned car, unable to speak, had he not raised his hand just enough that they could see it holding a page of Gogol's story "The Overcoat," which he had been reading at the moment of the crash. Like a white flag of distress, the page caught the eye of the rescuers and they pulled him out.

Young Gogol knows nothing of this. He just knows he wants a name that's comparatively normal. Trying to explain to his parents why he wants a new name, he says, "Nobody takes me seriously." "Who does not take you seriously?" his father asks.

"People," he said, lying to his parents. For his father had a point; the only person who didn't take Gogol seriously, the only person who tormented him, the only person chronically aware of and afflicted by the embarrassment of his name, the only person who constantly questioned it and wished it were otherwise, was Gogol.

I love this passage because it illustrates not just the angst of being a teenager, but the irony of human self-consciousness. So many of us walk around troubled by something about ourselves, that we agonize over and wish we could change, not realizing that most people probably don't notice it. Gogol hates his name and is conflicted about being Bengali. But if he were just another WASP, he would simply find something else about himself to hate, to be conflicted about, because that's who teenagers are. That's who people are. Gogol's position on the border of two cultures simply magnifies the angst and self-consciousness we all feel at times.

Just a Reminder

Tomorrow is the kickoff event for this year's Somerville Reads. It starts at 2 pm at the East Branch (115 Broadway). We hope you can join us!

Somerville Reads Kickoff!

Join us at the East Branch this Saturday at 2 p.m. for the start of Somerville Reads! From 2 to 5 you can listen to Bollywood music and enjoy a performance by the Somerville High School Nepali Dance Troupe. You'll also be able to get a henna tattoo custom-designed by local artist Manisha Trevedi (example at left) and contribute to an "immigration quilt" telling the stories of the people of Somerville. Refreshments will be served.

It's free and everyone's welcome!

If...

...you haven't started reading The Namesake yet, what are you waiting for? We still have plenty of copies at the library on a display rack in front of the reference desk. If you're hesitant, Michiko Kakutani's New York Times review should whet your appetite.

Somerville Reads 2011!

This month Somerville will begin its second annual one city/one book campaign, a community read project in which people throughout the city will read and discuss the same book. This year's book is Jumpha Lahiri's The Namesake, a novel that follows the lives of two generations of a Bengali-American family as they struggle with the conflicting demands of two cultures. Our kickoff event is Saturday, April 30, 2 p.m. at the East Branch Library, 115 Broadway. We'll be offering light refreshments and a performance by the Somerville High School Nepali Dance Troupe. This is the first of numerous events we'll be hosting throughout the city during May, including book discussion groups and a movie series on the theme of immigration. Stay tuned!

Vote for Somerville Reads 2011

Please help us decide our next book for Somerville Reads 2011. Please click on the below link and vote for your book choice. We hope to decide the next book by the fall and the program will launch in April of 2011.

Thanks for your input!

http://polldaddy.com/s/C61A07679A2F6F00

Somerville Reads Concludes

Thank you to all who participated in and supported our first Somerville Reads program! We hope you will continue to read The Things They Carried and to explore other Vietnam-related materials; many choices are listed on the left-hand side of this blog. The blog will stay active, as a place for future Somerville Reads programs and a place for your voice and opinions to be heard. We hope to have a lot of community input on the next book selection, for the 2011 program. Stay tuned to this blog for a survey and let us know the book you would like Somerville to read!

Finally, I leave you with a beautiful piece of artwork, created by our staff member Meghan. She is a librarian-by-day, but most certainly, an artist at heart. There is a lot to reflect upon in this painting and a lot to carry with us as we move forward.


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