Jacob Silkstone" />
  • ABOUT
  • PRINT
  • PRAISE
  • SUBSCRIBE
  • OPENINGS
  • SUBMISSIONS
  • CONTACT
The Missing Slate - For the discerning reader
  • HOME
  • Magazine
  • In This Issue
  • Literature
    • Billy Luck
      Billy Luck
    • To the Depths
      To the Depths
    • Dearly Departed
      Dearly Departed
    • Fiction
    • Poetry
  • Arts AND Culture
    • Tramontane
      Tramontane
    • Blade Runner 2049
      Blade Runner 2049
    • Loving Vincent
      Loving Vincent
    • The Critics
      • FILM
      • BOOKS
      • TELEVISION
    • SPOTLIGHT
    • SPECIAL FEATURES
  • ESSAYS
    • A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
      A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
    • Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
      Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
    • Nature and Self
      Nature and Self
    • ARTICLES
    • COMMENTARY
    • Narrative Nonfiction
  • CONTESTS
    • Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
    • PUSHCART 2013
    • PUSHCART 2014
Alone in BabelMarch 21, 2012

Neither here nor there

The Namesake

-Jhumpa Lahiri

 

   The edition of The Namesake I picked up here (‘for sale in the Indian Subcontinent only’) begins with a paragraph of praise from India Today, describing Jhumpa Lahiri as ‘a dispassionate narrator who lets life flow quietly through the winding corridors of suburbia’, rather than ‘an intrusive raconteur’. For a dozen or more pages, that description seemed piercingly accurate. The narrative eases (flows) from Ashima Ganguli giving birth to her husband’s decision, after a life-changing rail accident, to move to Boston, to her son’s life in America. Lahiri’s style is precise without being intrusive; it possesses the concentrated briskness of oral storytelling whilst being unashamedly literary (Ashima’s boy is called Gogol, after the author of The Overcoat).

   In fact, this is a novel of contrasts, of lines which seem to be clearly defined only to blur on closer inspection. Just as the Ganguli family is caught between Bostonian culture and Bengali culture, just as Gogol is trapped between two names (hating his pet name, he begins calling himself Nikhil), you sense that Lahiri is neither included in nor excluded from the text.  She may not be an ‘intrusive raconteur’, but the details of her life begin to intrude into the story.

  Early in the novel, she lingers on the Bengali habit of giving a child both a pet name (daknam) and a ‘good name’ (bhalonam): the pet name is used at home, and the ‘good name’ is used everywhere else. At this stage, it helps to know that Jhumpa is a pet name, and the author’s ‘good names’ are Nilanjana Sudeshna. The comparison between Jhumpa/Nilanjana and Gogol/Nikhil immediately suggests itself. Like Gogol Ganguli, Jhumpa Lahiri is the child of immigrants, and so America/India adds to the conflict of identities in both cases. Being neither wholly American nor wholly Indian, Gogol struggles to feel at home in either place: the novel follows his quest for, if not happiness, then at least acceptance.

  Having outlined the obvious points of collision between author and character, it seems significant that, after a divorce and the sudden death of his father, Gogol settles down to read The Overcoat in the final chapter. The last line is straightforward yet delightfully open-ended: ‘For now, he started to read’. Whether or not reading offers any kind of solution to a crisis of identities is a question that can’t be answered, but should nevertheless be asked.

   The Namesake was, once I’d finished the Murakami novel I’d bought to read on the plane, the first book  I picked up after arriving in Dhaka, and there were times when I tried to find myself hidden somewhere between the lines. Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli’s journey to Boston is hardly a mirror image of my flight from London – how could I possibly relate to their dawn-to-midnights efforts to rebuild their lives out of almost nothing?  – but you don’t have to stay long in another country to feel that sense of simultaneously longing for home and fearing that everything will have altered irreparably by the time you go back.

   For Ashima and Ashoke, Calcutta/Kolkata remains home, but their children are bewildered by ‘the commuters who cling precariously to trams and buses, threatening at any moment to spill onto the street, … the families who boil rice and shampoo their hair on the sidewalk.’ When they fly back to America, ‘relief quickly replaces any lingering sadness.’ Relatives from Kolkata phone late at night with bad news, and the distance between the two places only seems to grow.

  After Gogol’s marriage to a Bengali girl breaks down, Nikolai Gogol’s short stories become his strongest connection to home, and to his own history. Ashoke is busy reading The Overcoat (at half past two in the morning) when he is involved in a near-fatal train crash. He is saved after the pages of the book flutter amidst the wreckage, and the book becomes talismanic. It is presented to Gogol on his fourteenth birthday, but ignored until after Ashoke’s death. In the hours before the crash, Ashoke repeats his grandfather’s claim that books enable you ‘to travel without moving an inch.’ Ashoke uses the statement in the context of a discussion about travelling away and exploring the world — perhaps, at the end of the novel, his son discovers that books can also be a means of travelling back.

Tags

book reviewsdhakajacob silkstone

Share on

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Google +
  • LinkedIn
  • Email
Previous articleReading Czesław Miłosz in Bangladesh
Next articleModern master or misogynist (or both)?

You may also like

Nobody Killed Her

Z213: Exit

Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines

Ad

In the Magazine

A Word from the Editor

Don’t cry like a girl. Be a (wo)man.

Why holding up the women in our lives can help build a nation, in place of tearing it down.

Literature

This House is an African House

"This house is an African house./ This your body is an African woman’s body..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

Shoots

"Sapling legs bend smoothly, power foot in place,/ her back, parallel to solid ground,/ makes her torso a table of support..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

A Dry Season Doctor in West Africa

"She presses her toes together. I will never marry, she says. Jamais dans cette vie! Where can I find a man like you?" By...

In the Issue

Property of a Sorceress

"She died under mango trees, under kola nut/ and avocado trees, her nose pressed to their roots,/ her hands buried in dead leaves, her...

Literature

What Took Us to War

"What took us to war has again begun,/ and what took us to war/ has opened its wide mouth/ again to confuse us." By...

Literature

Sometimes, I Close My Eyes

"sometimes, this is the way of the world,/ the simple, ordinary world, where things are/ sometimes too ordinary to matter. Sometimes,/ I close my...

Literature

Quarter to War

"The footfalls fading from the streets/ The trees departing from the avenues/ The sweat evaporating from the skin..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Literature

Transgendered

"Lagos is a chronicle of liquid geographies/ Swimming on every tongue..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Fiction

Sketches of my Mother

"The mother of my memories was elegant. She would not step out of the house without her trademark red lipstick and perfect hair. She...

Fiction

The Way of Meat

"Every day—any day—any one of us could be picked out for any reason, and we would be... We’d part like hair, pushing into the...

Fiction

Between Two Worlds

"Ursula spotted the three black students immediately. Everyone did. They could not be missed because they kept to themselves and apart from the rest...."...

Essays

Talking Gender

"In fact it is often through the uninformed use of such words that language becomes a tool in perpetuating sexism and violence against women...

Essays

Unmasking Female Circumcision

"Though the origins of the practice are unknown, many medical historians believe that FGM dates back to at least 2,000 years." Gimel Samera looks...

Essays

Not Just A Phase

"...in the workplace, a person can practically be forced out of their job by discrimination, taking numerous days off for fear of their physical...

Essays

The Birth of Bigotry

"The psychology of prejudice demands that we are each our own moral police". Maria Amir on the roots of bigotry and intolerance.

Fiction

The Score

"The person on the floor was unmistakeably dead. It looked like a woman; she couldn’t be sure yet..." By Hawa Jande Golakai.

More Stories

Baudelaire and Cinema, Part I: Colour

Film Critic Marcus Nicholls suggests that we take a look at film, and Gus van Sant’s Last Days in particular, through Baudelaire’s view of art criticism.

Back to top
One last love letter...

April 24, 2021

It has taken us some time and patience to come to this decision. TMS would not have seen the success that it did without our readers and the tireless team that ran the magazine for the better part of eight years.

But… all good things must come to an end, especially when we look at the ever-expanding art and literary landscape in Pakistan, the country of the magazine’s birth.

We are amazed and proud of what the next generation of creators are working with, the themes they are featuring, and their inclusivity in the diversity of voices they are publishing. When TMS began, this was the world we envisioned…

Though the magazine has closed and our submissions shuttered, this website will remain open for the foreseeable future as an archive of the great work we published and the astounding collection of diverse voices we were privileged to feature.

If, however, someone is interested in picking up the baton, please email Maryam Piracha, the editor, at maryamp@themissingslate.com.

Farewell, fam! It’s been quite a ride.

Read previous post:
Reading Czesław Miłosz in Bangladesh

by Jacob Silkstone

Close