The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

I feel like this is a story I've seen before, but told with more nuance and aplomb than I'm used to. The story of a young man of immigrant parents adjusting to life as an American, stuck between two worlds, it feels like a staple of a certain kind of movie, one that includes its very own tropes, including parents who never adjust or understand. The Namesake, though, neatly sidesteps the stereotypes to come up with a more complex picture that both is and is not, that story.

This is a story of pastiche, of pulling together outside and inside influences, and not about which one is right, or better, but rather about how they come to form a life as it is, not as it should be or shouldn't be. The main character, Gogol, carries some of this pastiche in his very name - the grandmother of one of his parents is supposed to send a letter with a Bengali name for him to the United States, where he was born. But the letter is never delivered, and the grandmother dies before anyone can find out what he's supposed to be called. So, in the meantime, his parents name him Gogol on official documents, after the book by Nikolai Gogol that kept Gogol's father up on a train, which saved his life when the train crashed and killed everyone in the sleeping compartments.

Carrying a strange Russian last name as his first name, Gogol fights against that name for most of his life, although it isn't as easy as being right or wrong. It marks him apart, but any other name might have marked him apart as well. His parents try to give him a Bengali name when he starts school, but a kindly teacher notes that Gogol doesn't want to respond to it, and so Gogol it is until he changes it legally as a young man, to the name his parents tried to give him as his school name. By then he will be known as nothing else to his parents and those of his parents generation, within their Bengali circle of friends, but will be known as Nikhil to his peers as he goes to college, and later, lives in New York while he pursues a career as an architect.

But, notably, the narration of the book, the omniscient third person, continues to call him Gogol. As an act of rebellion, Gogol never reads the book his father gave him from his namesake, at least not until the very end of the book. That may seem odd, but I have a similar feeling about the movie The Outlaw Josey Wales. My dad loved that movie, and while I mellowed on other things he liked, I never did watch it before he died. Still haven't seen it, and I may never - not because there's an ideological point to be made, but because the joking argument over it is part of what I still have of my father, much as I had the routine about who taught me how to swear with my mother, the call and response worn smooth by repetition.

What I think I'm trying to say is that while Gogol and his parents are never not at least partially defined by their status as immigrants to the United States, neither are they entirely confined by it. It's a story of individuals - parents who mostly socialize with other Bengali expats, but a mother who starts to work at the library and finds friends there, who is happy when Gogol has a Bengali girlfriend and wife, but is not inflexible or judgemental when things change. It's not about finding the right answer, like there is a right platonic answer that would solve everything, a way of life that would make everything turn out right. Everything proceeds from what came before, and shapes Gogol and his parents and his sister, but what comes after each moment is the product of the sum, not the life that happened before Gogol's parents even left India and conceived him.

The answer is not to date white women, but the major relationship with a white woman does change who he is. The answer is not to date Bengali women, although his marriage also shapes who he is. It's all about what life throws at a person next, and how you react in that moment, not in response to an ideal of what should be, but in response to what is. Sometimes irrational, but mostly quiet, mostly kindly, mostly muddling. There's something very enjoyable about this story, and it's the warm humanity of the characters and the avoidance of neat stereotypes for each decision as it looms on the horizon.

Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Chris

I wonder if it is that to get a book published when you're an Indian ex-pat author, it needs to be really, really good. I suspect that may be the case, but I have to say that by far and large, the books I've read by authors (mostly men) who come from India have been just so good. Dynamic, interesting, compelling, often very difficult. It'll be a mark of progress when you don't have to be this good to get published, when mediocrity is allowed you the same as it is allowed white authors, but at the moment, damn.


Narcopolis was recommended to me a long time ago (possibly a couple of years ago) by a colleague in grad school. I tucked it away on my list and forgot about it, more or less, but when it made it to the top of that particular list a few months ago, I was happy to get it out from the library. Then I got sidetracked by my first year of voting for the Hugos, and just kept renewing the book until I finally finished all my award reading. So this was also the first book in about four months that I was picking up not because it was science fiction or fantasy and had been nominated. It was a very enjoyable return to my more usual mix of mainstream and genre fiction.

I devoured this book. I was eager to get back to it, never wanted to put it down, and yet, despite that, I am having a hard time summing it up. This is not a book you read for plot. It is only partially a book you read for characters. But it is definitely one you read for atmosphere and prose, and on those counts, I was pulled along in a haze not entirely unlike the drugged lens the characters put between themselves and the world they live in, Old Bombay in the 1970s.

The first chapter quickly plunges you into the world in a way that is not stylistically mirrored by the rest of the book, but works to give the reader an entry - it is one very long paragraph, and I'm not even sure there are sentence breaks. It is not linear, it does not make sense, but it never feels like it needs to make sense. We are brought into an opium den with the first viewpoint character. From there, the prose gets a little less experimental, but was never anything less that intriguing to read.

I don't remember much about that first viewpoint character, because we get to know him relatively little - that he had been in the U.S. but had to return to India, that he quickly turned to opium, that he drifts between a mainstream world and this shadowy one. We see his misadventures shepherding a former enfant terrible of the expat Indian literary and artistic scene to the opium den, then leaving him there - long-term sense of responsibility not being a notable feature of his drug haze.

We get to know Dimple, the woman who works the pipe, coming from a former (and present? The timeline was never entirely clear to me) profession as a prostitute. We hear her history, including how she came to smoke opium and then to work for the Chinese man who ran the opium den in its first incarnation, after fleeing mainland China and the Cultural Revolution. We learn about Rashid, the next proprietor of the opium den, and his family, and relationship with Dimple.

This book is not a diatribe about drugs. It is not idyllic about them. It is just exactly what it is, and feels like an attempt to capture the whole experience, as closely as the author can. (Wikipedia says it's based on his own twenty lost years of addiction.)  There are dangers on the street, people become more and more desperate for the release of drugs, and newer, harsher drugs enter the scene. There are attempts at rehab, moments of cynicism concerning recovery, honest attempts and regretful changes, and reversions.

I don't think this is a book for everyone. This is another in a long line of books I've said are for people with high tolerances for ambiguity and meandering. Who are open to an experience rather than a straighforward narrative. Who want to spend time in a world where squalor is escaped from into smoke.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

*Some Spoilers Below *

This is a difficult book to read, but despite its size, it would be a mistake to call it sprawling. Instead of taking in a vast cavalcade of characters, it shows the impact of The Emergency in India on not many, but on a few. Four, in particular. Although they know other people, it is through these four that we see how the state intruded brutally into the lives of its citizens, and how the vulnerable were, of course, the most vulnerable, while the powerful refused to believe that abuses were going on, preferring to blame the poor for their own fates.

This focus, sustained over such a long book, makes for an emotional read. The title of the book refers to a line one character speaks about a fine balance between hope and despair. Given what the characters undergo, it is apparent how easy it is to tip the scales towards despair.

We see The Emergency in India through four characters. One, Dina, is a widow trying to eke out an independent life so she doesn't have to be, more or less, a servant in her brother's house. To do so, she tries to set herself up as a middle woman for sewing piecework. Of course, her landlord wants to get rid of her so he can raise the rent, and having a workplace in the apartment is illegal. But she is desperate enough to try it anyway.

To do the actual sewing, since her eyes are failing, she hires two tailors. Ishvar and Omprakash, uncle and nephew, were born into an even lower caste, but Ishvar's father was one of the first to dare to have his son apprentice to a higher-status position. This does not go over well in the village. Ishvar and Omprakash moved to the big city after their work with a tailor and friend had dried up due to ready-to-wear fashion. They have trouble finding a place to stay, and once they have work with Dina, Omprakash, in particular, resents Dina's cut of the money for the work they do.

Dina's other money-making plan is to take in a boarder, a student studying air conditioning repair. From a slightly higher-status background, Maneck runs into The Emergency initially through the hostel where he lives, where he befriends a budding revolutionary who disappears after staging numerous demonstrations.

Ishvar and Omprakash take the most direct brunt of the increasing crackdowns, first in a shantytown, then sleeping on the streets. Some of the sections involving these two are truly harrowing. So far, this all sounds like despair. The hope comes in in the small flashes of family the four characters manage to create, sharing space and work and stories. That sounds lighter than it is - the stories are difficult, the work difficult, the life hard. But hope persists.

For some, anyway. Others find it slipping away. Still others manage to maintain it, even through truly horrific circumstances. The ending reminds me of Anna Karenina, and I'm hoping that's not too much of a spoiler, as one character succumbs to despair. The others forge on.

I feel like I haven't gotten the heft of this book across. Through the focus on a few, with a world that seems set against them, sometimes it was hard to take a breath, in sympathy with the constraints that continued to tighten around them. It's easy to feel the despair. It's harder to feel the hope. The balance tips. But not for everyone.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

I finished The God of Small Things yesterday, and decided to sleep on it before I tried to write a review, hoping that might make it clear what I wanted to say.

And I still don't know. I don't know what I thought about this book. I didn't love it - it's not one I'll rush out and tell all my friends about. Yet it was full of felicitous turns of phrase that I enjoyed very much.

The God Of Small Things is about a family in India in the mid-twentieth century (if my quick wikipedia search about Indian communism leads me to guess the right time period), their wounds, the things they say and don't say, the ways they conform to expectations and defy them, and the consequences, both direct and sudden and unexpected.

The story is very much a spiral around a tragedy, circling in tighter and tighter until the complete picture is revealed, which in the early book is hinted at, but it takes time before different elements interconnect.

And through the spiral cuts the straight line of malice from one character who acts with such petty viciousness that it turns a tragedy into a monstrosity.

This novel is full of damaged characters, all of whom were touched by at least one of the two major events, none of whom has fully come to terms with their actions or inactions. Anything Can Happen To Anyone, and does.

And yet, this is a small story, told by the God of Small Things, with the larger societal and political tragedies populating the background. In a way, the small things that happen in the book happen because of the Large Things, yet they are important to the characters because of their immediate impact, not their larger significance. And none of them can move past the Small Things. And so, in a way, they absent themselves from the Big Things, in ways that remove them from active participation in the world. (Estha's silence, Rahel's remoteness, Baby Kochamma's TV, Chacko's emigration, Ammu's eventual fate.)

This is a difficult book. It isn't light. But it does reward thought. And I think I liked it more than I realized.

Read as part of the BBC Big Read

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

I was never entirely sure who belonged to what family in this book, but it never really bothered me. I mean, after we switched back to a different group of characters, I was able to reconstruct who they were related to fairly easily, but I never could hold the genealogies in my mind.

Which is a way of saying that this is another large sprawling family book, and that's a genre I tend to love, if they're done well. And this one was.

And more than just a sprawling family tale set in India, it's about India at a particular time, (the 1950s), and the politics (national, local, academic, familial) that permeated the landscape. While the narrative loops lazily around family issues and affairs, reminding me of nothing so much as certain aspects of Jane Austen, the scene is intermittently broken by scenes of startling violence and power, emphasizing that even the most secure at this time were not safe when sectarian violence or political turmoil or simple accident came calling.

The comparison to Jane Austen came to mind often, and was probably helped along by the books the characters themselves were reading. They talked about Indian and Bengali literature often, but whenever a character went on a trip, it was Austen they were reading on the train. Or Trollope. Or another British classic. And indeed the comparative or deliberate Britishness of the characters was frequently a theme, particularly among the more status-seeking business class.

I enjoyed this book so much (and would have to, to stick with it through almost 1400 pages), and the characters and the descriptions, and the India which teemed with problems both familiar and foreign.

Read as part of The BBC Big Read