Names and Identity: The Book List

In preparation for the fast-approaching Fourth Annual Sonnet87.com Awards for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence (or, The 2009 Book Awards), I have already decided on a Best Discovery of 2009. Running a close second, though, Jhumpa Lahiri, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (a prize I don’t consider to be of much value, honestly, when it comes to my reading: Geraldine Brooks won this award and I think she’s an absolutely terrible writer and bases her story on the weakest of plots; while I enjoyed Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson’s win for Gilead confused the hell out of me because Gilead made me want to claw my eyes out from boredom; same deal with Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was not, in my opinion, the funny, magical realist powerhouse it’s supposed to be, and I’m totally at a loss on how to explain my dislike of the novel—can we start with an unsympathetic protagonist and work from there?). I’ve now read two of Lahiri’s works: Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake. I will be reading Unaccustomed Earth because I truly do enjoy her writing style: simple yet elegant with the ability to communicate, in a totally different way from most Latino writers, the immigrant experience. Lahiri’s style is a style I would love to emulate in my own writing when it comes to the immigrant experience; her work is cultural and proud of that culture without proclaiming that the culture, minus the American experience, is best. (This is what I find most troubling about Latino fiction; it seems like all Latino authors want to subtract the American half of their characters and preach to the ultimate rightness of being the Other. I disagree with this take because you cannot eliminate half of yourself; I agree that negotiating cultural expectations and American thoughts on the individual is painfully difficult—let me emphasize that, painfully difficult—but I do not think that those thoughts on the American individual are all bad and deserve the fair exploration that Lahiri appears to give them.)

Anyway.

This review focuses more on The Namesake than Interpreter of Maladies. Interpreter of Maladies lead me to The Namesake; Interpreter was absolutely, perfectly executed, I believe, and I wanted to see how Lahiri’s storytelling translated into a larger work of fiction. The answer: very well, but with one weakness.

Gogol Ganguli, a first-born Indo-American, is given an unusual name as his parents wait for a letter containing his “good name” from his maternal grandmother that never comes; instead, he is legally known as Gogol, a name that was supposed to function as his pet name at best, used at home but not in the real world. His father, a great fan of Nikolai Gogol, nearly dies in a train accident in India; this precipitates not only his decision to travel and expand his horizons (which eventually include a tenure-track professorship), but his belief that having Nikolai Gogol’s collection of short stories nearby helped to save him from death. Hence Gogol’s name.

Gogol’s struggle with his identity is of course the larger, overarching theme of the book; how he rebels and acquiesces to his parents’ desires and to their community of Bengali friends; how he deals with an unusual name (legally changing it to Nikhil before the start of college); how that name helps to define who he is within and outside of his family’s sphere. The issues are carefully examined and constructed; to me, names are fundamental to who you are, and to change them in any way sets off a chain of events that can leave you feeling unsettled, a little bit lost. A personal digression: Part of the reason why I refused to drop any of my names and insist on being Mrs. WordNerdia IPia is because WordNerdia anchors me; it is something that is familiar and that speaks of home and roots and culture. Over the past year of wedding planning, I would periodically practice saying “WordNerdia IPia” to myself, practice signing out an impossibly long name. By the time the wedding rolled around, I felt secure in the knowledge that I would not be yielding any part of my identity, and came to believe I would be enriching it by adding IPia to the set—my husband is now my family, and in adding his name I claim him as a part of me. Yet I still get pissy when WordNerdia is dropped because I need it to feel complete; Gogol finds it jarring to transition from one identity to another within the latter half of the book; I hope to never experience that jarring feeling because I want my two worlds (and families) united. I don’t care if I annoy people who would find it easier to call me just Mrs. IPia—that is not who I am, just like I’m not WordNer. I’m WordNerd. The devil, as they say, is in the details; do not overlook one part because in doing so you risk overlooking the whole. I can think of another example that applies to my husband and his name; it’s not my place to discuss it fully on this blog, but boy, when he’s called one thing by his family it nettles me. That is not IP! And IP agrees.

Anyway, the paragraph above is a stunning example of how accessible Lahiri’s novel truly is; it’s not solely about the immigrant experience, but about how you identify throughout life (most importantly, through your name), that can affect how you negotiate you travels throughout life.

The weakness of the story comes into play when Gogol’s father dies (remember: to read a WordNerd book list post is to risk spoilers!). At this point, Gogol’s courtship of and marriage to his wife are introduced, and that’s where Lahiri lost me for a bit. I felt that we saw too much of Moushumi’s reasons for marrying Gogol, and not vice versa. I don’t care about Moushumi, to be honest: from the moment the possibility of Gogol meeting her for a lunch date is introduced, you know what happens next. While I understand Lahiri’s desire to include a female voice when discussing the experience of first generation immigrant children, I felt that another novel was trying to creep into The Namesake. Too much of Moushumi’s life dominates the last 100 pages, and as a consequence we lose a lot of Gogol (the character we’ve come to care about). The marriage is explored in order to demonstrate the struggles between the American and the home cultures, and what could happen when you fold yourself into the home culture with little thought. Moushumi, ultimately, is unsympathetic and unlikeable, and her dominance of the last 100 pages is disappointing. The exploration could have been done with a sharper focus on Gogol and would have improved the last 100 pages. When the focus finally returns to Gogol, the book ends on a very high note.

Ultimately, though, this book is a strong recommend. Onto the book list.

Finished:

1) On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
2) Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose
3) The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
4) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
5) Fool by Christopher Moore
6) People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
7) The World of Normal Boys by K.M. Soehnlein
8) Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
9) The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
10) Little Man, What Now? by Hans Fallada
11) The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Translated by Lucia Graves)
12) South of Broad by Pat Conroy
13) The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
14) Dancing to “Almendra” by Mayra Montero
15) The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu
16) The Aeneid by Virgil (Translation by Robert Fagles)
17) The Implacable Order of Things by Jose Luis Peixoto
18) Intuition by Allegra Goodman
19) The Drinker by Hans Fallada
20) How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely
21) The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
22) The New Rules of Lifting for Women: Lift Like a Man, Look Like a Goddess by Lou Schuler, Alwyn Cosgrove, M.S., and Cassandra Forsythe

Re-read:

1) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling

Currently Reading:

1) Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn by William J. Mann
2) Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
3) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Waiting To Be Read (Already Purchased, Got as Gifts, Borrowed from My Husband or Otherwise Accessible without the Use of Funds, But Not an Assurance That I Will Read These Before I Buy More Books):

1) Shakespeare’s Wife by Germaine Greer