Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. An Indian family moves from Calcutta to suburban New York. The book follows the identity struggles of the son, Gogol. He hates his name and upon entering university, changes it. This move, however, fails to address the question we all eventually ask: Who am I? The book is rich in imagery; I particularly liked this one: Gogol/Nikhil is trying to remove a photograph from one of those magnetic page albums so he can show it to his girlfriend. It's a picture from his youth, in which she too is present. The book reads: "He tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past." (207)
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