Jhumpa Lahiri is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for her first book (Interpreter of Maladies, witch by the way I also think is brilliant). Afterwards she wrote The Namesake (which actually began as a short story).
The Namesake is a novel about a son of immigrants from Calcutta born in Massachusetts that is named after the famous writer Gogol (His father favourite author). It’s a fabulous book written in very “fluid” English, it loses all the flamboyance that some “newish” writers try to impose us, and focus on the story, on the details of Gogol’s life. Each chapter is a short story, with a different goal and a different set of personages, but always evolving around Gogol (Even in the first ones, that tell us the story before his birth, his parents’ marriage, his father’s love for Gogol, the moving to the US) telling us how he feels living with that particular name, how he feels having such different parents from all his colleagues, how he sometimes even feels marginalized. But it also tells us about his best moments, his achievements, his “joys”... telling us how he has lived the first three and a half decades of his life.
In the overall the book is fantastic; I really think it’s one of the best books I’ve read in the last year or so and I hope this young writer will presents us with more novels.
