. Spinning .

Overall, this book probably demanded more concentrated reading than I was able to give it. While I did not lose the trail of the stories, I obviously was not so enamored of them that I let some other things go by undone.

It was a fantastic concept of a futuristic world–yet set in a completely contemporary setting of Japan, 1980s. At least one section was, plus a few underground worlds and some weird groups both above ground and below. The ongoing other world is completely different; safe–if one stays within its walls–due to the sacrifices made. Yet despite the idea that without the sense of self and memories there is no great happiness nor any great despair, there was for me much sadness. The self represented by an intelligent, articulate shadow that must be shed, is treated rather cruelly. The beasts outside of the walls are also there for the purpose of cleaning up after others by absorbing their minds and then in turn die and are destroyed. There are people in the Woods we never get to meet yet we know their lives are miserable. The Caretaker, one who lives on the edge of the Woods but not allowed into the city, is not a happy camper. If the narrator himself has created this world, I’m sure I don’t know why.

Murakami has skillfully created a very detailed weave of narrative, yet he hasn’t taken his characters into full bloom, not even allowing them names. There is a sense of danger in both worlds, from the inklings and the semiotics in one, though we only meet that danger once when the narrator is beaten and his apartment trashed by two men. The inklings, though we read of their powers, are only a whispered rumble close by. In the other world, the Woods are the threat. We really don’t go into them deep enough to face any danger.

After I finished this book, I read again the back cover blurb which claims the story is “hilariously funny.” I’m afraid I didn’t get that part either. Perhaps some of it is due to the fact that I’m reading this book our of its era. It just didn’t appeal, but then, I’m not a huge sci fi fan, which this book can possibly qualify as, and perhaps it is my own fault for not reading and getting into it more expeditiously.

Not nuts about this, after over 350 pages and into the home stretch, that Murakami appears to explain all the goings on that up until this time, we are guessing and forming our own opinions about.

Starting with Chapter 25, (the odd numbers are within the past, I believe) and going through 27, and 28, the narrator finds out a great deal from the Professor who has embedded something in his brain specifically to test out a theory. The professor explains just about everything from his own beginnings with the System, through the narrator’s own purpose and into his future. It did clarify much to me, and yet, I’m not sure I was ever given a chance to reason it out had I wanted to.

Now, in Chapter 32, the narrator’s shadow explains what that world is all about and how it works. It’s just a little too pat and I’m surprised that Murakami didn’t unravel his wondrous tale a little at a time. Unless I missed it and these revelations that are obviously needed to understand where this story is going in the coming together of the two worlds of time are a gentle hand-up to those like me.

While I hesitate to come out and call it an infodump, in have the Professor in one story line and the shadow in the other explain everything to the narrator in a dialogue form, it is in effect explaining everything to the reader as well. It may be because I never got a chance to just read the whole thing through quickly (it took me months because of other obligations) though I did remember what was going on and didn’t have to back-read to refresh my mind (well, maybe once, when I got confused between the two librarians, one in each “world”).

Should be wrapping this up by tomorrow I hope.

Finally, I’ve reached a concept in the book that really struck me. This dialog between the narrator and his shadow, the shadow slowly dying, still planning its escape, yet anxious to relay what he’s learned since separated from the narrator:

“Just now you spoke of the Town’s perfection. Sure, the people here–the Gatekeeper aside–don’t hurt anyone. No one hurts each other, no one has wants. All are contented and at peace. Why is that? It’s because they have no mind.”

“That much I know too well,” I say.

“It is by relinquishing their mind that the Townfolk lose time; their awareness becomes a clean slate of eternity. As I said, no one grows old or dies. All that’s required is that you strip away the shadow that is the grounding of the self and watch it die. Once your shadow dies, you haven’t a problem in the world. You need only to skim off the discharges of mind that rise each day.”

“Skim off?”

I’ll come back to that later. First, about the mind. You tell me there is no fighting or hatred or desire in the Town. That is a beautiful dream, and I do want your happiness. But the absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.” (p. 334)

After all the oddness the two worlds have revealed as Murakami has drawn them (I at first thought they were parallel, now feel they are more past and future, as indicated by the tense structure as well), it is this lesson or possibility that he has brought us to: losing one’s self into the will of the community and secondly, one extreme demands its opposite, or otherwise normalcy involves a type of apathy.

This last thought reminds me instantly of the need for evil to know good, for sadness to have happiness, etc. that is a topic of importance in The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. It is based on the theory that if we have not experienced sadness, for example, then we could not comprehend its opposite of happiness because there would be no way to gauge the contrast. I find as I grow older I am more convinced of this personally. Traumatic events of the past hold their own in my mind until something worse might happen; same thing with events or people who delight me. Age hones the senses rather than dulling them, I think. And to shut oneself off from the world in order to protect oneself, to attempt to live in peace and harmony, tends instead, to numb one to all feelings, good or bad, frightening or comforting.

I’m getting towards the last 50 pages here, and I’m anxious now to see how Murakami fuses his two worlds. He has already made the narrator aware in the past that he will die and move onto another world, but as we see the present, the shadow here is speaking of escape before it itself dies, and is begging the narrator to leave with it.

And this is neat; within the expected action and resolution crops up another conflict: his feelings towards the Librarian.

First of all, let me say that I’ve been reading this book like forever, or at least it seems that way. To be fair, my mind had been retrained to seek the immediate resolution of flash fiction and thus a novel-length book was suddenly overwhelming unless it was quick-paced action that required little involvement from the reader. Murakami demands more.

I’m not totally convinced that the story itself and even the writing wasn’t falling a bit short of my expectations. Surely McCarthy or Faulkner would not have let me put them down for weeks at a time. And this story of Murakami’s is not one that is easily followed unless you keep in mind that there are two stories here: likely the same narrator, a futuristic analyst with a brain implant who is caught up in a weird world of a scientist and his granddaughter in one; and in the other, a dream reader who must give up his shadow and live within the confines of a town walled in and watched over by a Gatekeeper. The former is written in the past tense, the latter in the present.

The thing with Murakami is that he manages to create unusual environments, lay them out, people them with characters with whom for some reason, have depth but do not truly elicit empathy, juggle pace and plots so that sometimes reading two pages is a chore and sometimes reading twenty flies by in a snap, include dull details interspersed with danger and action, and toss action and danger amid dull details.

There is no real lovely language here; it is stark and perfectly suited to the dreary starkness of both worlds. Even in the simplicity of words the settings emerge real enough in the reader’s mind–even if it’s not what Murakami himself imagined. Therefore, there wasn’t anything I read that sent me dashing off to the laptop to blog about and share, until this:

No, these holes could go on forever. And I would never get to read that morning edition. The fresh ink coming off on your fingers. Thick with all the advertising inserts. The Prime Minister’s wake-up time, stock market reports, whole family suicides, chawan-mushi recipes, the length of skirts, record album reviews, real estate, . . . (pg. 235)

This is the narrator’s thoughts as he’s following the scientist’s granddaughter through a slick black plateau of holes from which leeches emerge in this underground world. The thought is odd because as the story is evidently the future, the looking back to a more normal present for this character goes further back to a time not of DVDs or CDs but of “record album” reviews. And newspapers–which have already become a rarity for morning reading.

Even as I feel these two stories are of the same character and are separated by time, there is at last a reference in one of the other:

Back to the newsreel, arcs of water shooting across the screen, spillway emptying into the big bowl below. Dozens of camera angles: up, down, head on, this side, that side, long, medium, zoom in close-up on the tumbling waters. An enormous shadow of the arching water is cast against the concrete expanse. I star, and the shadow gradually becomes my shadow. (pg. 238)

This, in the dark underground world, as he is following the granddaughter to some sort of safety. This, while in the parallel narrative, he has given up his shadow to the Gatekeeper.

And, a hint at what is perhaps being drawn out as a theme; the loss of self? No names are given to the narrator nor any of the main characters. They are the Professor, the Colonel, the chubby granddaughter, the Librarian, etc. This would also tie in with the rather flat characters who we never-the-less endow with a sense of reality. And just at this point in the story, the narrator also begins to realize that when he gave up his shadow, he gave up his memory, his own sense of who and what he is.

I’m not sure whether the story’s getting better at this point or I’m just coming down from a flash-fiction high and learning to concentrate for longer than two minutes, but I know I’m enjoying the story more and want to read, rather than pushing myself out of guilt.

(Still, I must admit that reading the jacket blurb describing the book as  “hilariously funny” isn’t something I remember feeling at all.)

Well yes, I guess the last full novel I read was “The Namesake” back in April 2011. And yes, shortly thereafter I started Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World but in truth, I’d only made it 200 pages in by the end of the year.

Well of course I’ve been reading! Short flash pieces of my friends’ work. Poetry, art (yes, you can read art just as you can paint a story), too much current event news coverage, and my own pieces as I flash-edit (a new term I’ve just made up to indicate the fast nature of flash fiction writing). That’s what I spent most of last year doing: writing. Every day, a story a day. Now I need to organize them all in Tinderbox (as I did the previous year’s 100 Days Project), tag them with style or theme if not genre, clean them up, and plan to put a book or two together out of them and make some attempt to publish.

I’m also getting (or planning on getting) more active with my reading and reviewing here at Spinning. I suspect that my couple of years of reading and writing flash fiction may have tuned my mind into short spurts of attention, and I may have to slowly expand it into novel length not only to read, but to write.

See, I’m also planning on writing a hypertext narrative of novel length.

But first, I’ve just gone through fifty more pages of Murakami today and once I go back and refresh my memory with what I read in the beginning of the book, I’ll post the first review. Not my usual style, where I’d post almost daily as I read, but it’s a start!

Help the children by your purchase (all proceeds to charity) and read some beautiful and heartbreaking stories by buying the e-book “The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology” available at Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble–and yes, I’m proud to be included here! Purchasing info at: http://the-lost-children.blogspot.com/

The third quarterly issue of the fabulous 52/250 project has just been released and it’s another winner.

thirtynine is a selection of the best stories and poetry produced during thirteen weeks of work by an average weekly  group of between thirty to forty writers. The 52/250 Project was based on a different prompt each week that offers the winds of creative thoughts and stories to fly, unlimited by anything other than a 250-word restriction.

My own story Unspeakable is included in this anthology and I thank the excellent work of the editors, Michelle Elvy, Walter Bjorkman, and John Wentworth Chapin for once again producing an amazing collection.

It’s funny, I’m mimicking Jhumpa Lahiri here in using the final post–in her case, final chapter–as a summary and wrap-up of the story.

To be fair, I believe that yes, The Namesake likely (obviously) earned its place on the New York Times Bestseller List at the time. My failure to recognize and accept what that means may have made me a bit harsh on the author. Danielle Steel has been on the List numerous times. It’s more an homage to marketing and the tastes of a large reading audience than a testament to writing, the writer, the story, or anything truly literary. The fact that Lahiri’s first book, a collection of short stories called The Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize helped sell The Namesake, I’m sure. I’m more at home with a book that asks more of me as a reader, and delights me with skill and finesse as a writer.

In the closing chapter, there are some (not) clever references back to the supposed thread (which I still think involves Indian cuisine) of Gogol’s overcoat, books, and trains:

He slips the book he will give her for Christmas into the pocket of his coat, making sure it’s well concealed, and calls the elevator to take him upstairs.  (p. 173)

He’d slept most of the journey to Boston, the conductor poking him awake once they’d reached South Station, and he was the only person left in the compartment, the last to get off. He had slept soundly, curled up on two seats, his book unread, using his overcoat as a blanket, pulled up to his chin. (p. 280)

The prose is simple, no frills, and I do appreciate that to a certain degree. But a few adjectives, similes, metaphors, something to indicate vibrancy rather than the flat image of colors of clothing and what’s on the plate would have been nice. I like eloquence, playing with language, interesting images projected through words; there is none of that here. The best line of the book, even though it is subjected to Lahiri’s love of writing about food, was this:

It’s a pleasant change of pace, something finite in contrast to her current, overwhelming, ongoing task: to prepare for her departure, picking the bones of the house clean.  (p. 277)

What Lahiri does in two pages of this final chapter, is sums up the traumatic change that comes with immigrating to a new country, the integration into a new culture while holding onto the traditions of what one knows (for Ashima, pages 278-279). And something I hadn’t realized, even as only a second generation born American, the melding of two cultures, one that comes along with rites and traditions that may be brought out only on holidays, that school friends do not share, that is intimate to family and friends of the same culture, that Gogol goes through. (p. 281)

We finally do get a quick peek at how Gogol’s marriage has ended and it’s done in typical reporting, this-is-what-happened style and Moushumi is kicked out of the book cleanly and quickly.

The last scene is at Ashima’s home, celebrating Christmas with a big party, the final one as Ashima will be moving to Calcutta to live for six months, then back for six months to stay with Sonia, her daughter, or Gogol. Ashima sends Gogol upstairs to find a camera to take pictures and rooms and things bring memories that are both pleasant and sad. But the killer, the thing I couldn’t believe a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer would even think of doing, is this:

And then another book, never read, long forgotten, catches his eye. The jacket is missing, the title on the spine practically faded. It’s a clothbound volume topped with decades-old dust. The ivory pages are heavy, slightly sour* silken to the touch. The spine cracks faintly when he opens it to the title page. The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol. “For Gogol Ganguli,” it says on the front endpaper in his father’s tranquil hand, in red ballpoint ink, the letters rising gradually, optimistically, on the diagonal toward the upper right-hand corner of the page. “The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name.” (p. 288)

*Lots of things in this book are described as sour; Maxine’s lips, the part in Moushumi’s hair. Weird.

Yes, folks, there it is. the book Ashoke gave Gogol on his fourteenth birthday. Never opened, never read. Now, at the end of this tale, he’s going to avoid the celebration, the people, his family, one more time, to read “The Overcoat.”

Was this a “bad” book? No. Was it stellar? No. To me, I’d see it as a good airplane trip, or beach vacation book to take along. I will be reading more of Lahiri, most likely getting a copy of Interpreter of Maladies to see what the fuss is all about.

Ohmigod, are you serious?

Chapter 11 has established that Moushumi is having an affair, is traveling with God-knows-who, and Gogol, ignorant, slightly suspicious (because Lahiri once again lets us know this by using clothes as a tip-off, Moushumi has packed a bathing suit), but trusting, is awaiting her return from a trip. That’s how the chapter leaves off:

He imagines her puttering around the apartment, drawing a bath, pouring herself a glass of wine, her bags in the hallway. He slips the book he will give her for Christmas into the pocket of his coat, making sure it’s well concealed, and calls the elevator to take him upstairs. (p. 273)

Leaves the reader anxious, as a good chapter might, no? We know she’s back because Lahiri has the doorman tell Gogol (and us). But we get this opening of Chapter 12:

It is the day before Christmas. Ashima Ganguli sits at her kitchen table, making mincemeat croquettes for a party she is throwing that evening. They are one of her specialties, something her guests have come to expect, handed to them on small plates within minutes of their arrival. Alone, she manages an assembly line of preparation. First she forces the warm boiled potatoes through a ricer. (etc.) (p. 174)

Honest to God, we get the recipe here and slipped in along with the breadcrumbs we find out that Ashima has sold the house and is leaving to spend her time between India and the U.S., and oh yeah, she feels guilty about setting Gogol up with Moushumi.

Aside from the train wreck that Ashoke suffered early on, his death, and that damned name of “Gogol” there’s been little real conflict in the book. That’s why I suspected by the discontented Moushumi at the anniversary meal, together with the within 30 pages back-cover of the novel, that something might finally be coming to a head.

I was right; well, wrong about the pregnancy, right about Moushumi. Discontent boiled down to possibly boredom, lack of need to rebel against something, or just plain old hot pants, she has an affair. Oddly, it stems from her noticing a return address on an envelope in the mail room of the university where she is sorting the mail, finishing the job the dead employee who was wheeled out that morning didn’t get around to. Convenient of old Alice to drop dead; to me, unskillfully contrived.

Before we get the description of Moushumi’s lover, we get a typical Lahiri description of their dinners he makes her at his apartment:

They begin seeing each other Mondays and Wednesdays, after she teaches her class. She takes the train uptown and they meet at his apartment, where lunch is waiting. The meals are ambitious: poached fish; creamy potato gratins; golden, puffed chickens roasted with whole lemons in their cavities. (p. 263)

and, after a quickie glimpse of sex that moves the bed, we’re treated to a flashback of their first meal together:

They drank glasses of prosecco. She agreed to an early dinner with Dimitri that night, sitting at the bar of the restaurant, for the prosecco had gone quickly to their heads. He had ordered a salad topped with warm lambs’ tongue, a poached egg, and pecorino cheese, something she swore she would not touch but ended up eating the better part of. Afterward she’d gone into Balducci’s to buy the pasta and ready-made vodka sauce she would have at home with Nikhil.  (p. 264)

In between Lahiri’s coverage of food, we get our much-needed description of Dmitri:

Some gray has come into Dimitri’s hair and chest, some lines around the mouth and eyes. He’s heavier than before, his stomach undeniably wide, so that his thin legs appear slightly comic. He recently turned thirty-nine. He has not been married. He does not seem very desperate to be employed. He spends his days cooking meals, reading, listening to classical music. She gathers that he has inherited some money from his grandmother. (p. 163)

And this, for the past several chapters we appear to be in danger of losing Gogol as he fades into the distance and focus is on Moushumi’s life, her thoughts and actions, her selfishness instead of his. After losing Ashima and Ashoke, I’m sincerely worried now for Gogol.

Here again, an event of some importance that could be used to round the characters, provide insight into the relationship, indicate change or motive, Gogol and Moushumi go out to dinner for their first anniversary.

They’ve both dressed up for the occasion–when she emerges from the bathroom she sees that he is wearing the shirt she’s given him, moss-colored with a velvet Nehru collar of slightly darker green. It was only after the salesman had wrapped it that she’d remembered the rule about giving paper on the first anniversary. She considered saving the shirt for Christmas, going to Rizzoli and buying him an architecture book instead. But there hasn’t been the time. She is wearing the black dress she’d worn the first time he’d come to dinner, the first time they’d slept together, and over it, a lilac pashmina shawl, Nikhil’s anniversary present to her. She still remembers their very first date, liking the slightly untamed look of his hair as he’d approached her at the bar, the dark pine stubble on his cheeks, the shirt he’d worn with green stripes and thinner stripes of lavender, the collar beginning to fray. (p. 247)

Lahiri’s attention to detail of surroundings, clothing, meals, for me, is just filling up space. It’s like she was asked to fulfill a word count rather then establish setting, provide grounding, or set mood.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that there is no poetry to her writing. Her use of simile is limited and metaphor is near non-existent (“dark pine (?) stubble”). That’s fine, I suppose, but the flat out description of the material world of this novel would certainly benefit from a bit of lyricism. The whole event seems to unfold in this manner, a series of things–shoes in a window, quail bones on his plate, what the waiters are wearing, how many people in the restaurant, should, but don’t seem to define her slowly developing bad feeling in a way that would be better served by actual conversation between the couple perhaps. As a matter of fact, Gogol seems to be in her peripheral vision this evening. I was also expecting this discomfort of Moushumi’s to be trying to tell me something, maybe that she’s pregnant, rather than merely still dissatisfaction with her life. And here again, I have little sympathy for someone who has all the advantages she has had and still is “unhappy.”

This was the kicker to the clothing detail Lahiri loves, when the next day as Moushumi is entering the university campus to teach a class she is upset by an ambulance and a body being wheeled out.

A number of onlookers cry out in alarm. Moushumi’s hand goes to her mouth. Half the crowd is looking down, away, shaking their heads. From the splayed feet at one end of the stretcher, wearing a pair of beige flat-heeled shoes, she can tell it’s a woman.  (p. 255)

Ah yes, but what size shoe?

In Chapter 8, Gogol is set up with Moushumi and there’s quite a whirlwind affair. Lahiri at long last seems to have Gogol actually caring for someone. There is a quick escalation of the relationship and for some reason, we’re given a blow by blow of Moushumi’s past which includes a broken engagement–yes, this point would be important enough–and the rather stark realization that while she lived in Paris, she slept with just about anybody. Sometimes two and three in one day. I’m not sure she told Gogol this, but Lahiri does tell us, in one of her “tell, don’t show” episodes. Of which the next chapter is a shining example.

Chapter 9 is quite possibly the worst chapter in this book so far. With Gogol and Moushumi dating through the work of their parents, they get married. There is the wedding, a trip to Paris, and a dinner party with friends of Moushumi.

We get such minute details of the wedding, the guests, the food, and yet not much of the ceremony. Here again, it’s almost like a reporting of an event that misses the meaning, the feeling behind it.  Even when they go to Paris for a brief stay, we get a description of the apartment of a friend where they’re staying:

Instead of staying at a hotel, they stay in an apartment in the Bastille which belongs to a friend of Moushumi’s, a male friend named Emanuel, a journalist, who is on holiday in Greece. The apartment is barely heated, minuscule, at the top of six steep flights of stairs, with a bathroom the size of a phone booth. There is a loft bed just inches from the ceiling, so that sex is a serious hazard. An espresso pot nearly fills the narrow two-burner stove. Apart from two chairs at the dining table, there is no place to sit. (p. 230)

I only wish that Lahiri had allowed as much time to the reason that Moushumi was so vague and distant after she delivered her presentation that she’d worked so hard on.

He sits down, orders a coffee. “How was it? How did it go?”

She lights a cigarette. “Okay. Over with, at any rate.”

She looks more regretful than relieved, her eyes lingering over the small round table between them, the veins in the marble bluish, like those in cheese.

Normally she wants a full account of his adventures, but today they sit silently, watching the passers-by. (p. 233)

We may assume that Paris reminds her of a time in her life when she was happy, independent, and in love. But she’s newly married and it seems a little odd. It’s likely that the presentation makes it obvious to her that she’ll be leaving Paris again, but we just don’t have the fullness of the scene that would have made it notable.

The last segment of the chapter is the dinner party at her friends–and here Lahiri gives us more information about the guests and what they do for a living and the description of the house, the meal, and their former ties to her ex fiancee that its all unnecessary information. Meanwhile, the changes that are seeping into the couple’s relationship is sort of passed over. Even with a (rather convenient) discussion among all the couples about baby names, and the blurting out by Moushumi that Nikhil’s name was originally Gogol elicits a rather strange response from him. He is thirty years old by now and should have come to terms with it by now. The name, more than anything, still seems to irk him.

The final lines in this scenario, and of the chapter, leave me wincing.

And yet he can’t help but recall a novel he’d once picked up from the pile on Moushumi’s side of the bed, an English translation of something French, in which the main characters were simply referred to, for hundreds of pages, as He and She. He had read it in a matter of hours, oddly relieved that the names of the characters were never revealed. It had been an unhappy love story. If only his own life were so simple. (p. 245)

Huh? How complicated is his life? He’s been raised by loving parents, gotten all the education he could desire, has a good job, never gone hungry, had a few sexual affairs that didn’t require any emotional input from him, married a woman who he was genuinely attracted to and felt something for. Poor Gogol!

Here’s where I think Lahiri may falter, and where a more seasoned writer would have taken the story to a higher level:

A year has passed since his father’s death. He still lives in New York, rents the apartment on Amsterdam Avenue. He works for the same firm. The only significant difference in his life, apart from the permanent absence of his father, is the additional absence of Maxine. At first she’d been patient with him, and for a while he’d allowed himself to fall back into her life, going home after work to her parents’ house, to their world in which nothing had changed. Initially she’d tolerated his silences at the dinner table, his indifference in bed, his need to speak to his mother and Sonia every evening, and to visit them, on weekends, without her. But she had not understood being excluded form the family’s plans to travel to Calcutta that summer to see their relatives and scatter Ashoke’s ashes in the Ganges. Quickly they began to argue about this, and about other things, Maxine going so far one day as to admit that she felt jealous of his mother and sister, an accusation that truck Gogol as so absurd that he had no energy to argue anymore. And so, a few months after his father’s death, he stepped out of Maxine’s life for good. Recently, bumping into Gerald and Lydia in a gallery, he learned of their daughter’s engagement to another man. (p. 188)

This is the opening of Chapter 8. In the previous chapter, Ashoke has died of a massive heart attack while away in Cleveland and Gogol goes to identify the body and make arrangements for his father’s ashes and to clean up the apartment he rented while there on a grant.

What I would have been looking for here is some realizations, some justification for the change in Gogol towards both his family and Maxine. He goes to India presumably after many years, after disassociating himself from it, to go there and deposit his father’s ashes and see family he hadn’t seen in a long time, and yet there is no mention of what I would have thought was a turning point in his life. What would have been a big event for the family. For Ashima, returning there as a widow.

There is nothing but a brief explanation of the termination of his two-year affair with Maxine and his total involvement in her family. Here, after all, is something that he desired–the life if not Maxine, since Lahiri hasn’t really established a loving or committed relationship there.

Two life-changing events without real depth given to their importance to the story. Yet we’ve had menus of meals, name-dropping of branding, rooms described down to the curtains and sounds. And no time devoted to Gogol’s reconsideration of his identity and the loss of his father, over the details of the arrangements and a couple childhood memories (that frankly I would have put into the previous chapters at the appropriate time to add insight into the father-son relationship). I’m surprised and disappointed.

What I see in the above excerpt reads like a quick story summary. Like Lahiri wants to get Maxine out of the picture because even she knows that this relationship hasn’t come off as solid. She wants to move on, get Gogol into another segment of his life. I’m hoping that he becomes more human as we go.

Okay, so I’ve learned that this is not the book for which Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize. I found this out by checking the cover again after puzzling over the last few pages of reading. It’s been made into a major motion picture–and that I can see, the story would be entertaining on the big screen, but I cannot quite see how it made the New York Times Bestseller list.

I was so happy that I’ve been going through this book as quickly as I have been–at the halfway point now–since it’s been hard to concentrate on anything longer than flash fiction for the past year due to the heavy amount of reading and writing that genre and length. It’s beginning to dawn on me why.

The Namesake is a simply written, simply structured novel. The characters are limited to Ashima, Ashoke, and Gogol pretty much. The life of Gogol so far has been a series of jumps in time tied together with small events that spend more time on description of setting and environment than real character development. As a matter of fact, there are facts stated about the characters yet I don’t see the real depth of the characters themselves.

For example, I don’t really understand why Gogol is so strongly adverse to his name. We are told that he grows to dislike it, and we can guess that there’s more behind it–I came up with the difference he faces in cultures between home and school/work life coupled with typical teenage rebellion and striving for identity. But Lahiri hasn’t really shown us the inner conflict on the name; she’s told us.

I’m also beginning to lose empathy for Gogol–though I feel strongly still about his father in particular (his mother has sort of faded away as a force in the story) and that’s probably because I know what he’s carried around within him from the train accident he suffered through as a youth–and even there, there’s no real focus on why it means so much to him and why what he was reading at the time (Gogol) would have made such an impression. But as for Gogol/Nikhil, he’s jumped into a relationship with a woman named Maxine and has pretty much moved in with her and her parents. They are wealthy and intelligent and he seems to be ashamed of his own parents in comparison. Ashoke is a prominent university professor–why would Gogol place a lawyer and a museum textile curator above him?

On a visit to Maxine’s family’s lake home, Lahiri gives us a blow by blow description of the furnishings, the food they eat for dinner, and where Gogol and Maxine make love. What she doesn’t give us, however, is a glimpse into the mind and soul of her main character.

Feels so good to be getting through a book more than a page or two at a time. Here I am at the end of Chapter 5 and I’ve noticed a few more things.

The point of view is obviously third person, omniscient, as we shift focus from the original main characters of Ashima and Ashoke to their son, Gogol (a.k.a. Nikhil–more on this in a bit). Lahiri includes the date, or year, below each chapter number, thus dividing the story into sections that actually span a few years, allowing Gogol to grow up, struggle for his identity, move in a direction that weaves in the history of his name even as he spurns it.

Something interesting about the way the novel is set up, with the narrative guided so strictly by timeline, is that the book is entirely in present tense. Present tense is difficult to employ throughout a story the length of a novel. It is used most often in the crime fiction genre where it is best used to keep up the tension. Present tense in truth becomes past the moment after it is read, however, and to use it within the structure of this novel and to do it credibly and well, is a tribute to Jhumpa Lahiri as an author.

At the end of the previous chapter, Gogol is coming home for Thanksgiving on a break from college when the train he is on is halted for many hours following a suicide on the tracks. When his father picks him up at the station, he is obviously a bit worried. Ashoke then tells Gogol the real reason he has been named after the Russian author, and tells him the details of that horrible night when he was seriously injured in a train wreck. Gogol is dumbstruck, learning so much more about his father than he’d never thought to ask, and gaining a new respect of sorts for the name.

When he started college, Gogol officially changed his name to Nikhil, leaving only those in his past, his family and his friends in Massachusetts referring to him as Gogol. What struck me at this point of the story is that we, the reader, are part of that past association. The character is still being referred to as Gogol to us. It’s an interesting point, and yet one where much of the fine points of writing are at play. The author must encourage an empathy for his main characters. To switch names on us now would be risky. We, more fortunate than even Gogol’s parents, are privileged to still know him by his pet name.