Not even the source of his namesake," Lahiri writes as Gogol gets a volume of The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol as a 14th birthday gift from his father. "Not only does Gogol Ganguli have a pet name turned good name, but a last name turned first name.Īnd so it occurs to him that no one he knows in the world, in Russia or India or America or anywhere, shares his name.
There is a Zen-like calm on her pages, and those who inhabit them, all ordinary people, seem to have given themselves to the situation, as if choices and chances are invitations to disorder. In Maladies, the mundane and the banal assume a kind of mystery as Lahiri-never an intrusive raconteur who plays with emotional debris but always a dispassionate narrator who lets life flow quietly through the winding corridors of suburbia- visits the private, limited spaces of Bengali immigrants in America. So Gogol Ganguli is a legitimate progeny of Lahiri, and as a character caught in a rhyming contradiction, he plays out the now-familiar Lahiri script in style, thereby making her first novel The Namesake (HarperCollins India Rs 395 290 pp) an enlarged variation of the same existential trauma of the culturally displaced that animates her debut Interpreter of Maladies (1999), the collection of short stories made her an instant, camera-friendly sensation in literary New York. The poignant pathology of Gogol's pages, whose rustle will echo even in Franz Kafka, may not have inspired Lahiri's exilic meditations in American suburbia, but as a writer of sculpted-to-perfection short fiction, she has earned her privilege to invoke Gogol. Why Gogol of all writers? The question is as inevitable as "What's in a name, anyway, Nikolai Vasilievich?" Nikolai Gogol, who lived a short, schizophrenic life and mainly wrote short stories, including the all-time great "Overcoat", could not have been so distant a writer to Lahiri, whose sandesh-sized works in fiction have made her a much-celebrated, New Yorker-feted, Pulitzerworthy goddess of small, beautiful maladies. More than a century later, Jhumpa Lahiri will borrow that tattered piece of cloth from one of the greatest stories ever written and put it on the protagonist of her first novel, literally, though never fully covering the many ironies of this literary makeover. We all came out of Gogol's over." That was Fyodor Dostoevsky's tribute to the fellow Russian.
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