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I read this book on several plane journeys and while hanging around several airports. I'm putting the emphasis on ‘several� because it took me a long time to read it even though I was in a hurry to finish. I was in a hurry, not because it was a page turner but because I really needed to get to the end.
And although I read it in relatively few days I still read it very very slowly. There are a lot of words in this book.

I love words. I can read words quite happily for hours as long as they don't come encased in boring reports or long winded articles. I'd be very poor at reading detailed accounts of real life happenings for a court case or an insurance settlement, for example. I imagine my eyelids would droop and my attention would wander. I'm sure that in such a situation, I'd jump at any opportunity to do something else instead. So it was wise on my part to read this book on a journey, given that I was obliged to remain in my seat and do nothing other than read. It's well known that I can't do nothing, therefore I read this book to the end.

You’ll have gathered by now that I think of this book in terms of a report or a historical document, one in which the author felt duty bound to record every detail of the experiences of the people whose lives she had chosen to examine. They may be fictional characters but they sound like real people, and their stories sound like an accumulation of real data. All those trips to Calcutta - it seemed as if the reader gets a report of each and every one.

In literary fiction as opposed to report writing, it’s reasonable to expect that an author will have picked through the mass of facts they’ve accumulated, retaining only the best and then further selecting and polishing those best bits in such a way that the reader will admire and retain them in turn. On one or two occasions, Jhumpa Lahiri manages to extract an interesting gem from her accumulations - as when a bride-to-be tentatively places her foot in one of the shoes her future husband has left outside the door of the room where she is about to meet him for the first time. We are with the girl in that pause before she turns the handle on her new life. We see her try it for size.

That scene was short and perfect. Contrast it with this description of a character who enters the story for three pages and is never heard from again. Donald (I can’t even remember why he appears in the story now) is tall, wearing flip-flops and a paprika-colored shirt whose sleeves are rolled up to just above the elbows. He is handsome, with patrician features and swept-back, slightly greasy, light-brown hair.
What was the significance of the shirt colour, I wondered? Or him being tall, or his hair being greasy?

The book is full of metaphors that appear meaningful at first glance but then you say, wait a minute, what does that really mean? As, for example, when the main character and his father walk to the very end of a breakwater, and the father says: “Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere else to go.�
There had been a long lead-up to this line which ends a chapter. I wondered if I'd missed something significant that would have made the finish line amaze and impress me. But I couldn't bear to wade through the chapter again to find out.

The main premise of the book is in fact based on a metaphor: a mistake in the choosing of the principal character’s name comes to represent the identity problems which confront children born between cultures. In this case, the American requirement for a baby to be officially named before leaving hospital clashes with the Bengali practice of allowing the baby to remain unnamed until the matriarch of the family has decided on a name. Soon after his (very detailed) birth near the beginning of the book, the main character is temporarily named Gogol by his parents because the letter containing the name chosen for him by his Bengali great grandmother hasn't yet arrived in Boston. The father has picked the temporary name Gogol because he owes his life to the fact that he was sitting close to a window reading Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat� when a train he was traveling on crashed, and therefore escaped. Since the letter from the grandmother never arrives, ‘Gogol� becomes the main character’s official name and his love/hate relationship with it eventually comes to define his life.

The 'name' issue is interesting but it's a bit of a stretch on the author's part to make it the central framework for the entire saga. I tried hard to relate the story of ‘The Overcoat� to the main character's life in an effort to understand everything better, but apart from wondering if his yearning for an ideal name could be compared to Akaki’s yearning for the perfect overcoat, I was lost.
This is a good moment to mention the utter seriousness of Lahiri’s writing. Considering the connections she painstakingly makes with Nikolai Gogol, the lack of humour in her writing stands out in complete contrast to the Russian author who not only knows how to extract the essence of a situation and present it in short form, but also how to do it with underlying humour.

I don't dismiss this book about the problems of assimilation and dual identity without asking myself if the relationship Lahiri seems to have with minutiae reveals something important in her writing. As the daughter of Bengali emigrants, I understand that she may feel a responsibility to write down the stories of people like her parents, people who arrived in the US as young emigrants and struggled to retain their own culture while trying to assimilate the new one. People who, once a spouse dies, must move between their relatives, resident everywhere and nowhere. That theme echoes two other books I read recently about exiles, Us & Them and Exit West, both of which led me to read The Namesake - I wanted to see how Lahiri dealt with similar issues. But while there are parallels between the three books, 'Us&Them' and 'Exit West' are beautifully pared back; the extraneous details have all been removed and we’re left, especially in the case of 'Us&Them', with exquisite literary cameos that are far more memorable than Lahiri’s lengthy if historically accurate scenarios.

I feel that Lahiri may have some awareness of her tendency to include too much information. She offers a kind of run-through of the themes in the last few pages as if her book had been a textbook and we students needed to have the central arguments summed up for us.
But alongside that awareness, I wanted Lahiri to impose some writing constraints on herself. I wanted her to consider how she would write if she had only a very limited vocabulary and the simplest of grammar structures at her disposal.

But she did exactly that, I hear you shout, she went to live in Italy for two years and forced herself to read and write only in Italian!

Coincidentally, I have the book that resulted from that journey though it had lain unread since I bought it some months ago. So I searched my book piles and found In Other Words and began to read it. It's a parallel text - her original Italian text plus a translator’s English version. Lahiri says at the beginning that she purposely avoided translating it herself because she feared she would alter it in the process, making it more elaborate�.and longer!

She has a lot of interesting things to say about her own writing:
By writing in Italian I think I am escaping both my failures with regard to English and my success. Italian offered me a very different path. As a writer I can demolish myself, I can reconstruct myself…I am in Italian, a tougher, freer writer, who, taking root again, grows in a different way…My writing in Italian is a type of unsalted bread. It works, but the usual flavor is missing. On the other hand, I think that it does have a style, or at least a character. The language seems like a waterfall. I don't need every drop

And most interesting of all in the context of this (rather long-winded) review, she says:
I continue, as a writer, to seek the truth, but I don't give the same weight to factual truth...