The Namesake

I've just finished it. The quickest read ever (by quick i mean a matter of weeks). it didn't blow me away the way the Interpreter of Maladies did but it was very great nonetheless. Her prose is so simple and everything about the book is just so very natural. Except maybe the whole name business that obviously was carefully plotted, constructed as a guiding theme to flesh out the rest of the pages. AND Jhumpa Lahiri, why did you have to lie when you said during your lecture at Brown that you loved the movie version!? I'm not going to go through the whole "does the movie do the book justice?" judging business because I firmly believe the original and its renditions, although impossible to not be compared, have to be judged in their own merits. That said, the movie, in and of itself, was not all the great. I am well aware that the essence has to be shortened, simplified, but should never be meant to be simplistic. Ok enough with the bashing...

She treats most of her main characters amazingly well. Gogol's wife, Moushumi - who was once again squarely left out in the movie, treated as some sort of Gogol's rebound girl - is such a crazily fresh, tangible, humanly, and important character! Overall, if you look for a seamlessly plotted book, this might not be the one for you. which leads me to think that a novel is not her favorite thing to write after all. On several occasions, she would just leave her climaxes unresolved, unexplained at the turn of the page. This recurrent lack of denouement kind of reminds me of the way she treats each story in the Interpreter of Maladies.

I'm impatiently waiting for my copy of Unaccustomed Earth to arrive! I hope for it to be breathtaking and nothing less. Interpreter of Maladies already set the bar really high. But i'm sure it won't disappoint but short stories are where her strengths lie obviously.