He meets Ruth, an English major, and they date for a while, although he never introduces her to his parents. The family spends eight months in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, and both children experience this visit as their parents uprooting them from their home country.Īs he enrolls at Yale University, Gogol decides to change his name officially to Nikhil, but the name Gogol stays forever with him.

When Gogol becomes a teenager, he starts to feel distanced from his parents, and he develops a hatred for his unusual name. The Gangulis have begun to assimilate to the American way of life to allow their children to grow up with American values, even celebrating Christmas. When Gogol is five, Ashima gives birth to a daughter, whom they name properly, Sonali, calling her Sonia at home. They expect the proper name to arrive for the baby boy in a letter from Ashima’s grandmother, according to tradition, yet the letter never arrives, and the boy remains Gogol, contrary to Bengali customs by which everybody has a family pet name and an official name with a deeper meaning.Īfter initial loneliness and isolation, Ashima begins to meet other Bengali families, and the Gangulis form a group of friends who remind them of their family communities in India. In the hospital, Ashima remembers the first time she met Ashoke during their arranged marriage ceremony. Ashoke believes Gogol saved his life in a train accident in India seven years ago. In 1968, Ashima gives birth to their first child, whom they name Gogol after the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. The edition of the novel used for this guide is by Mariner Books, e-book edition, 2004.Īshima and Ashoke Ganguli are Indians from West Bengal who immigrate to America in 1967, so Ashoke can attend his PhD at MIT. She has been awarded the National Humanities Medal and teaches at Princeton University. She is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

She writes in English and Italian, and her style is often characterized by simple, descriptive sentences with little dialogue.

The novel’s author, Jhumpa Lahiri, was born in 1967 London to a family from the Indian state of West Bengal and grew up in America.

The namesake a novel by jhumpa lahiri