Word: gogol
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Unexpectedly, the couple must decide on a name quickly, and settle on Gogol, the surname of Nikolai Gogol, a Russian author whose work Ashoke is convinced saved his own life years earlier. Gogol Ganguli is born into a world of multicultural sensibilities, his name an indication of his own hybrid existence...
When asked about the origins of the novel, Lahiri said that it began with the name. A neighborhood boy in Calcutta, whom she had never actually met, was named Gogol, and she “filed [it] away” in her mind...
...Namesake is a novel about distance, geographic and emotional, but it's also about time. The decades zoom by in a parade of poignant tableaux, and the Gangulis' son Gogol grows up to become a successful architect, but he is never quite comfortable in his own skin. He feels neither Indian nor American, without even a true home to feel homesick for. But a series of tableaux, however poignant, does not a novel make. In her Pulitzer-prizewinning story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri mastered the art of ending on a freeze-frame, leaving her characters suspended in a moment...
Through the 19th century, several more churches and administrative buildings were built on the grounds of the monastery. Famous Russians, from the writer Nikolai Gogol to founder of the Tretiakov Gallery Sergei Tretiakov, were buried in its cemetery...
...Fandorin, who quickly becomes swept up in a glamorous whirl of moneyed expatriates and gambling, champagne-guzzling aristocrats. You'll understand right away what the Russians see in Akunin: he writes gloriously pre-Soviet prose, sophisticated and suffused in Slavic melancholy and thoroughly worthy of 19th century forebears like Gogol and Chekhov. The Winter Queen is as delicate and elegant as a Faberge egg, and, thank the Czars, we still have nine more untranslated Fandorin mysteries to look forward...