I liked the explanation of the difference between a 'good name' and a 'nickname'. Whereas for the children (Gogol in particular), trips back to Calcutta feel like a chore, and the Bengali ritual of hosting guests every weekend feels like an alienating force. They take every opportunity they can to connect with the local Bangladeshi community, and they look forward to their trips back home. The parents are still mostly connected to their homeland - they miss their families and they miss the familiarities of India. It is also interesting to watch the difference between the lives the parents live, and the lives their children live. The early scenes of Ashoke and Ashima gave me some insight into what it might have been like for my own parents to build their new lives in the UK. USA, with the result being that it almost always resides in the no-man's land between the two places. They succeed at this, for the most part, and over the course of the book the place they call home shifts from Calcutta to Cambridge, Mass. They are plucked from their familiar homes in East India and pulled to a foreign country where they are required to make a life for themselves.

My favourite sections, I think, were the scenes of Ashima and Ashoke (Gogol's parents) at the beginning of the book. This week I read Jhumpa Lahiri's 'The Namesake'. book review The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri This article contains spoilers!.

The book namesake