March 21, 2013
I read Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, as part of a course on multicultural literature during my undergraduate days. A common theme in her writing involves children of Indian immigrants, and assimilation into American culture, which is, to say the least, quite different from the culture of India. I've always been a little fascinated by Indian culture. There is a surprisingly large population of Indian and Middle Eastern people in my small Midwestern city, and when I used to teach swimming lessons in high school, I taught some little kids whose mothers came on the pool deck in absolutely gorgeous saris. I thought some of the younger mothers were the most beautiful women I'd ever seen (the picture of Lahiri on the back flap of this book shows her to be really beautiful as well, with huge, piercing eyes). The Indian children were cute, too, and I seem to recall that they gave me less problems than some of the other kids (not to stereotype, that's just how I remember it). I quite imagined that these women, so traditionally dressed (just as Ashima, one of the main characters, is described in the book), kept within their own little community of Indian immigrants (I wasn't familiar with terms like 'Bengali' at that point), as I saw them do on the pool deck, in their own way resisting assimilation as much as possible.
That's basically how Ashima and her husband Ashoke cope with life in America. Ashoke had already been a student at MIT when their marriage was arranged, and she returned with him. The story follows Ashima, and the lives of her husband and their only son, until Ashima leaves to stay with her brother in Calcutta a few years after her husband's death. Ashima never really imagined spending her life in America, and it took her a long time to even find some sense of belonging there. It was her husband's near-death experience, years before they met, that led them to a strange new country, and that also gave their son his accidental name.
Names are another big theme in this book. Names are purposeful; everyone is given their name for some reason, even if it's as simply as their parents liking it for some reason. There's a story behind the strange spelling of my first name (though with some digging, I've found that it's a more common spelling in the UK...not that my parents are British). Though their son was named "accidentally" (according to tradition, they were going to wait for a letter from Ashima's grandmother, with her name for the baby in it, which never arrived before she died), his name had a real meaning. He wasn't just named for one of his father's favorite authors, Nikolai V. Gogol (though he "only" read English translations, he didn't seem to feel like this was cheating), but for the circumstances that saved his life after a horrific train wreck. Ashoke had been reading "The Overcoat" (which I reread this afternoon after completing the book) when the train crashed, and when rescuers were searching for survivors in the wreckage, he'd been able to get their attention by waving a page of the book, thus being rescued, and ultimately surviving.
Ashoke had met a man on the train, who had advised him to travel far and wide, to see the world and go west, specifically to America. Ashoke had shaken the man off at the time, claiming to be content in the world as it was presented in his beloved books. But knowing that the man had died without getting to go to England again, that he perhaps would not have died if he had not given in to his wife's demands to return to India, affected him; thus, he transferred to the U.S., and spent the rest of his life there. He has what would be considered a successful life there. He has a nice home in suburban Massachusetts, and a job as a professor of engineering at a local university. But he and his wife live between their two worlds, clinging to their Bengali friends throughout New England, getting together with them as often as possible and dragging along their Americanized children.
Gogol and his sister Sonia (her real name Sonja) aren't bad kids in the least, but they rebel a bit against their parents. The story mostly follows Gogol, as well as his parents, as he comes into his own between two cultures, in a way. His American friends aren't interested in his Indian culture, though it is so much a part of him; every few years, he goes and spends months in India (a remember the same thing happening with a kid in middle school, who left in the middle of 7th grade and wasn't back from India until the next school year). He goes to college at Yale to put some distance between himself and his parents. He even changes his name, resenting how strange it is. I can't help but wonder how "strange" he would think a Bengali name would be if he'd had to grow up with it among his American classmates, but it makes it even stranger (in his view) that his first name is Russian...and a surname, at that. He's also humiliated in high school literature class, when his teacher gives a lecture on Gogol, revealing the author to have been a disturbed fellow.
I read some Gogol in another undergraduate course (the same one in which I was exposed to the poetry of Baudelaire), "The Overcoat" being one story that we focused on in class. I had written a paper on the story, and one point that I'd focused on was the main character's name. Akaky Akakyevich can be taken from its Greek roots to mean something like "innocence" or "guilelessness," which would be appropriate to describe the character, who really is just an innocent, pathetic sort of creature. According to Wikipedia, when his name is pronounced correctly in Russian, it kinda sounds like their word for "poop," which, again, would be appropriate for a guy who gets shit on all of his life. Ashoke was fascinated by story, because it is just such a senselessly tragic story, about this guy who has a pathetic job, who saves for months just to have this nice new coat made for him, and its stolen off his back on a cold Russian night, and he later dies from getting a fever in the wintry streets. And nobody wants to help this guy! It's just too pathetic, and yet it says so much about the state of the world, even today.
I haven't read many other Russian authors, but Ashoke, as a young and literate man, loved them. His grandfather was a professor of Russian literature, or something like that. But Ashoke still grew up in poverty (it doesn't seem that Ashima suffered quite the hardships that he did), and the luxuries of life in America offer him some relief, though he is still very watchful of even the smallest signs of wastefulness. This is something that causes a divide between himself and his son, who, like many Americans, has a collection of things that he gets no use out of (books he doesn't read, records that don't catch his interest). I was frustrated that Ashoke had not tried to share the real story of Gogol's name with his son when he was still a teenager, before Gogol had the chance to change his name. I think he underestimated his son's ability to understand the significance of it.
But Gogol does change his name, to the Bengali Nikhil, the "good name" that his parents had wanted him to start using when he started kindergarten. But at that young age, Gogol only knew himself as Gogol, and wouldn't go along with it. Besides, it was the name on his birth certificate, the name that his parents had put down, because they had to put down something before they left the hospital. This new name gives him confidence. From there, his life as a young adult seems pretty ordinary. He becomes an architect, and he dates American girls. He has two serious relationships, and those are pretty ordinary, too...except that he never introduces one to his parents, and the other, he feels embarrassed the couple of times that she is around them. He and his serious girlfriend Maxine, a pretentious, wealthy Upper East Side girl who has moved back in with her parents and stays with "Nick" in her swank private floor, break up after his father's death. After Ashoke has a sudden heart attack while living briefly in Ohio for a research grant or something, Gogol feels guilty for separating himself from his family, and spends as much time with his sister and mother as possible.
Now, Gogol does not go so far into his mourning in the book that he shaves his head after his father's death (which, if I remember right, Gogol in the film version does, as depicted by Kal Penn), but he doesn't back away from his parents' culture so much. He even takes his mother's suggestion to look up an old family friend, a young woman around his age. He and Moushumi, with their shared childhood experiences, quickly fall in the love and marry, but their hasty union proves disastrous. In the end, Gogol is successful in his work, but he now wonders if he'll ever find someone to marry for life, to have a family with. His sister is going to marry a man who is not Bengali, and they seem happily in love, and Ashima is happy for them (though they will be having their wedding in India to please her). Ashima, widowed for a few years, is going home, and feels some regret at leaving the life she has built in America behind, though she'll return annually to see her children.
Besides Ashoke's early near-death experience, the events and circumstances of the lives of the Ganguli family are not in any way extraordinary. Lahiri wrote a story about realistic, likable but flawed (read: real) people. She presented a point-of-view that is important for her, one that, I imagine, has had an effect on her own life, and is certainly not one that is represented in today's mainstream culture. I mean, the US has a substantial population of people from India, but they're one underrepresented minority group. Besides Kal Penn (best known as Kumar from those very silly movies...again, NPH is hysterical), the only other American actor of Indian descent that I can think of is Aziz Ansari, the really loud comedian. Um, Gus is dating a woman of Indian descent (by way of England, like Moushumi in the book) on Psych. Is he still dating her? I've missed the last couple of episodes.
Anyway, my point is, though the characters in this story were fairly average people, I really enjoyed this book. Maybe for the fact that they were just ordinary people, and that Lahiri wrote so intimately about their lives, about their fears (like for Ashima, of losing touch with her ever-shrinking family in India, or for Gogol, who seems to fear the negative effects that his name would have on his life, as unclear as they are to him), and their desires, but mostly in just the details of their day-to-day existence. The details that Lahiri gives about her characters carefully illustrate not just what they look like, but who they are. She does the same thing with their surroundings, particularly their homes or personal working spaces. And, of course, their names.
It's pointed out a couple of times in the book that Ashima and Ashoke never address each other by their names. The reader isn't told what names they use for each other, their private pet names I guess you could say, which makes these names all the more powerful. Ashima and Ashoke, after being forced to name their son officially before learning her grandmother's choice, reflect on how naming in their culture is so different from America, and are frustrated when no one understands the concept of pet names and good names. For them, Gogol was supposed to be the pet name, and it becomes a family joke of sorts that their son carries it for life. But the story of how he got it, with his father's survival of the train wreck...it's a hell of a story, making it a hell of a significant name, which Gogol reflects on in the end. He will, forevermore, be known as Nikhil, the name that was supposed to be his good name all along, but he is sad that the people who call him "Gogol" are so few and far between. It is not until it is too late that Gogol realizes the real meaning of his name. But there is hope, of course: he is still fairly young, though divorced, and can still find a wife and have children, and perhaps pass the name and its significance on.
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Jhumpa Lahiri. Apparently, "Jhumpa" is her "pet name." She hasn't published any other novels, but I may add her other short story collection to my list.
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