Why should I review a book only after giving a complete go? I am free from any work as my application is on downtime. I decided to write about the book which I am half way through. Beginning Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, I realized immediately that this book is certainly not that of regular kind pick the book read and throw kind of which we usually read. This book in certain ways is purely emotional and has cultural identity which any transnational can relate into. The plot certainly is combination of both certain and uncertain events that we either undergo or shall we here of. Lahiri’s language is the language I daily experience it, it’s also the most unfamiliar dialect and also combination of the two. When I decided to take up this book after completing Kushwant sahib’s “The company of women” – which in any case the worst of his works, I was in particular to get engaged with the kind of work Lahiri has given which describes the real phenomenon the transnational associates universally recognize. I started sensing the transnational emotions, the reason behind extending boundaries both the physical and emotional attack on the same, the value of family in a family, its preciousness, meaning of the word home and the same of home away from home. The Namesake is a clear example of this, though I have not personally undergone this transnational living or stepped outside Mother India I can relate to the characters portrayed by the author. These emotional adventure the characters live is easy to understand and difficult to digest. The Namesake is not the story I can relate to myself or of those known to me but it could plausibly be any one of so many transnational stories, which is why it’s familiar to me. I don’t know where this book will take me, it will be like anything else in this innocent world, will be a journey, with the destination unknown. But I do know one thing, even apart distinguished from its brilliant portrayal of the transnational lifestyle which is experienced by more and more people in our modern day world; it is brilliant on its own. I can give vivid example of one scene in which Ashima, a young Indian girl about to become a bride, inserts her feet into her future husband’s shoes before ever setting eyes on him, so that his shoes, “brown shoes with black heels… [And] lentil-sized holes embossed on either side of each shoe”, are her first experience of him, clearly shows. I can’t wait to keep going.
P.S. To be reviewed later once the reading is done.
P.S. To be reviewed later once the reading is done.
