The Namesake: A Portrait of the Film (Newmarket Pictorial Moviebook) [Hardcover]

Jhumpa Lahiri (Author), Mira Nair (Author)

Book Description

Series: Newmarket Pictorial Moviebook | Publication Date: December 1, 2006

Original essays and glorious photography, stunningly designed in this unique moviebook from the director of Monsoon Wedding and Vanity Fair—a Fox Searchlight release.

In her essay "Writing and Film," the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri writes about the experience of seeing her novel "transposed" from paper to film. "Its essence remains, but it inhabits a different realm and must, like a transposed piece of music, conform to a different set of rules….To have someone as devoted and as gifted as Mira reinvent my novel…has been a humbling and thrilling passage."

Mira Nair's essay, "Photographs as Inspiration," begins with the provocative comment: "If it weren't for photography, I wouldn't be a filmmaker." She explains how photographs help her crystallize the visual style of her films and which particular photos influenced her vision for The Namesake.

These two essays, written exclusively for this Newmarket Pictorial Moviebook, introduce an amazing panoply of images of people and places shot mainly in New York and Calcutta during the making of the movie, accented by excerpts from Lahiri's bestselling novel. Six Indian and American photographers' works are represented.

Brilliantly illuminating the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations, The Namesake tells the story of the Ganguli family, whose move from Calcutta to New York evokes a lifelong balancing act to adapt to a new world while remembering the old. The couple's firstborn, Gogol, and sister Sonia grow up amid these divided loyalties, struggling to find their own identity without losing their heritage. Kal Penn (Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Superman Returns) stars as Gogol.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This slim, glossy volume pays homage to both Jhumpa Lahiri's bestselling novel, The Namesake, and its Hollywood adaptation while also shedding light on the creative process and friendship between author and director. In her opening remarks, Lahiri briefly describes the novel's conception ("The Namesake began as a note to myself, casually jotted down at some point in my twenties, consisting of the phrase 'A boy named Gogol'"), its slow route to publication and later its blossoming into film ("how strange and wonderful to watch the story I had invented, alone and over the course of so many years, being collectively wrestled with anew"). Lahiri emphasizes that collaborating with director Nair was a rewarding experience. For her part, Nair describes her interest in Lahiri's novel as immediate: "The Namesake was many of my worlds: the Calcutta I left behind as a teenager, the Cambridge where I went to college, and the New York where I now live." The two women's essays are followed by dozens of vivid images-from both the film set and the India of Nair and Lahiri's memories-interspersed between passages from the novel. Lovers of the film and novel will relish this tribute.
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About the Author

Mira Nair is the internationally acclaimed director of Monsoon Wedding, Salaam Bombay!, Vanity Fair, Mississippi Masala, The Perez Family, Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, and Hysterical Blindness. Jhumpa Lahiri, the author of Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, has been the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Photographers represented include Frederick Elmes, Nemai Ghosh, Milan Moudgill, and Dayanita Singh.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Newmarket Press (December 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1557047413
• ISBN-13: 978-1557047410
• Product Dimensions: 10.7 x 7.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,373,729 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You'll Need a Box of Tissues for This One, June 24, 2009

By 

Thomma Lyn "author and reader" (East Tennessee) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Namesake: A Portrait of the Film (Newmarket Pictorial Moviebook) (Hardcover)

Here we have a novel that illustrates the power of fiction to deeply touch the heart. I, an East Tennessee gal, identified so strongly with Lahiri's protagonist, Gogol Ganguli, a second-generation Bengali guy, that by book's end, I was a soppy, teary mess.

An interesting thing about this book for me was that I'm right around Gogol's age. So much about his growing-up years was familiar from my childhood, from Rubik's Cube to the TV shows that were widely shown at the time. And oh yeah - like Gogol, I have an odd name (though I like mine).

The story starts when Gogol's parents, Ashoke and Ashima, emigrate from Calcutta to America and settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so Ashoke can study engineering at MIT. Soon thereafter, Gogol is born.

When Ashoke and Ashima arrive in America, they must get to know each other while they're getting to know their new country, for theirs was an arranged marriage. And for years, Ashoke has been haunted by the memory of a terrible train accident that nearly took his life. With him on the train, he'd carried a book of short stories by the Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol, and it was a page of Ashoke's favorite story, "The Overcoat," that he was clutching when he was rescued.

Ashoke and Ashima had planned to give their son a name that Ashima's grandmother promised to recommend, but since they need a name to put on his birth certificate, Ashoke decides to call him Gogol, after his favorite writer. Gogol will be his pet name, and he'll get his "good" name when the grandmother's recommendation arrives. It's when Ashoke sees his son for the first time that his haunting memories of the train accident begin to ease their grip on his mind.

Ashima's grandmother has a stroke, and Gogol never gets his "good" name. And as he grows up, his pet name, Gogol - and its oddness - becomes a symbol for his being part of one culture (India - his parents') and part of another (America) but not wholly in either one. He resents his name more and more, as it seems to epitomize how he doesn't fit in anywhere. On his fourteenth birthday, Gogol receives a gift from his father: a beautifully bound volume of Nikolai Gogol's short stories. Young Gogol, however, isn't impressed: he's more interested in the Beatles, so he shelves the book and forgets about it. And when he grows up, he legally changes his name to Nikhil.

Gogol's struggles between American culture and Indian culture is personified, in his adulthood, by two women. The first is a woman from Manhattan who attracts him because she and her wealthy, cosmopolitan family are so different from his parents. The second, like Gogol, is a second-generation Bengali - their parents are friends, and they'd grown up together. I won't give anything away here, but I'll say that each relationship, in its way, teaches Gogol something about himself and encourages him to look within to find and articulate his personal truths about being a young man torn between two worlds. It is these truths that form the raw material of his hopes for his future.

The Namesake is a beautifully written novel - the characters, particularly Gogol and his father - formed themselves in my mind like memories of people I've known. The book is bittersweet and poignant and speaks, simultaneously, of hope and regret, of life's beauty and its injustices.

It's worth noting, too, that Ashoke's favorite story, "The Overcoat", is about a humble clerk who dies of fright after being upbraided by an Important Person, only to get his revenge in the afterlife. Keep that in mind as you read this wonderful book - it's a subtle but evocative metaphor that's a central thread throughout.