The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri (2003)
“A name can be a gift, a wound, a country, and a life sentence — sometimes all four.”
EraContemporary
Pages291
Difficulty★★☆☆☆ Moderate
AP Appearances4
Character Analysis
A man who spends twenty years running from a name and then discovers the name was the most important thing he was given. His trajectory — from childhood embarrassment to adult flight to grief-driven return — is the arc of the novel, but it is the arc of a person who is always slightly behind his own story.
How They Speak
American English — colloquial, unaccented, native. The ease of his English is his most visible American credential. His Bengali is passive and rusty. When he visits Calcutta, he cannot follow conversations.