Post B # 1

I have only read 37 pages into the novel, but so far, I like The Namesake. I just saw "1968" pasted right above the title for chapter 1, but if that hadn't been there, on page 31, the narrator mentions the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, which took place on June 6, 1968. The novel starts out in sometime in August of 1968, and takes place in Cambridge, ten minutes to Harvard, and twenty to MIT. Ashima has just started to go into labor with Gogol.
Lahiri does a great job of narrating, and almost makes it seem as if the novel switches off from being told from the viewpoint of Ashima, Ashoke, and another narrator. "But nothing feels normal to Ashima. For the past eighteen months, ever since she's arrived in Cambridge, nothing has felt normal at all. It's not so much the pain [...] its the consequence: motherhood in a foreign land. [...] But she is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare (6)." Perhaps her biggest fear is living in the United States, and having to raise Gogol in a country unfamiliar to both of them. That fear seems natural, because people generally fear the unknown. Anyway, though, when I read the paragraph about this, I didn't even notice that it was written in third person, and it seemed completely from her point of view. Another quote about Ashoke, I also thought was written in first-person, just from his point of view, instead of Ashima's. "He now desperately needs a cup of tea for himself, not having managed to make one before leaving the house. [...] He takes off his thick-rimmed glasses, fitted by a Calcutta optometrist[...](11)." This is a unique writing style that I have never encountered, and I am excited to read more of this.