Ashoke chooses a name that has particular significance for him: on a train trip back in India several years earlier, he had been reading a short story collection by one of his most beloved Russian writers, Nikolai Gogol, when the train derailed in the middle of the night, killing almost all the sleeping passengers onboard. But the letter from India with the child’s official name never arrives, and so the baby’s parents decide on a pet name to use for the time being. According to Indian custom, the child will be given two names: an official name, to be bestowed by the great-grandmother, and a pet name to be used only by family. Soon after they arrive in Cambridge, their first child is born, a boy. Isolated, desperately missing her large family back in India, she will never be at peace with this new world. Ashoke is forward-thinking, ready to enter into American culture if not fully at least with an open mind. Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli arrive in America at the end of the 1960s, shortly after their arranged marriage in Calcutta, in order for Ashoke to finish his engineering degree at MIT. The Namesake follows the Ganguli family through its journey from Calcutta to Cambridge to the Boston suburbs. “An exquisitely detailed family saga.”-Entertainment Weekly “Dazzling…An intimate, closely observed family portrait.”-The New York Times
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