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Eola Road Branch's monthly book discussion. February's selection: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Join us for Eola Road Branch's Breakfast Book Club. We read a variety of fiction titles, mainly historical fiction, and meet once a month for a lively discussion. Stop by the 2nd floor reference desk to pick up a copy. No registration required.
Book description:
In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail — the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase — that opens whole worlds of emotion.
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.
Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves (from Goodeads.com).
This branch shares the Eola Community Center buiding with the Fox Valley Park District. It offers a quiet reading room with a fireplace, study rooms and a family computer lab. The Eola Road Branch has public meeting rooms that may be used for community programs.