The Namesake

By Jhumpa Lahiri

What an wonderful read! This has got to be my favorite literary piece so far. Lahiri is an exemplary story-teller.

It tells about the life of Gogol, an American of Bengali descent. His family migrated to the States from India and the novel relates how migrating to a foreign land is never really an easy task.

There are several lines from the book which I can so very well relate to:

But nothing feels normal to Ashima. For the past eighteen months, ever since she's arrived in Cambridge, nothing has felt normal at all. It's not so much the pain, which she knows, somehow, she will survive. It's the consequence: motherhood in a foreign land. For it was one thing to be pregnant, to suffer the queasy mornings in bed, the sleepless nights, the dull throbbing in her back, the countless visits to the bathroom. Throughout the experience, in spite of her growing disconfort, she'd been astonished by her body's ability to make life, exactly as her mother and grandmother and all her great-grandmothers had done. That it was happening so far from home, unmonitored and unobserved by those she loved, had made it more miraculous still. But she is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare.

...

UPDATE (09 March 2007):

I just found out that The Namesake has been made into a film with Kal Penn as the lead actor and Mira Nair as director. It starts showing in the States today. I can't wait to see it here in Oz. The trailer looks quite promising so I'm pretty excited to see if the movie is as well made as the book.