Thwarted Escape

An Immigrants Wayward Journey

by Lopamudra Banerjee

2016236 pages

About the book

How far can one truly go away from his/her ancestral roots, filial ties and the claustrophobic grip of traditions and the reminiscence of an emotionally fraught childhood and puberty? Thwarted Escape, the award-winning memoir/nonfiction book begins with this particular quest, and it is this quest which gains momentum as a woman seeks the essence of herself-identity ten thousand miles away from her Bengali hometown. With the lens of a time-traveller, her narrative journey encompasses her first sexual abuse, her first tryst with death, austerity, the strangeness of rituals, the inexplicable feelings of puberty and also her surrendering to love, procreation, motherhood. In her self-chosen exile in the US, she discovers that deep within; her ancestral roots a real soothe well spring of her psychological, spiritual existence. In the process, she keeps on oscillating between assimilating and disintegrating, which forms the core of her journey.

Editorial Reviews:
It is a book that will talk to you on lonely nights, when you remember somebody close that left for a foreign shore. It is a story of every migrant, more so, of women going abroad for running homes of rank strangers, lovingly reclaimed later as their soul-mates, in the odd tradition, the strange logic of arranged marriages of India. The book is an ode to Kolkata and America by a woman writer making waves through her solid writing.
--Dr. Sunil Sharma, Editor, Setu: A Bilingual Journal
Depending on which chapter you’re reading, you could say Banerjee is a memoirist, a creative writer, an essayist or a journalist. But no matter what label you choose for her writing, you will see Banerjee has major writing talent – the culmination of a passion that was borne at an early age when she considered words her playmates.
--J O' Reilley, Chanticleer Book Reviews
Banerjee, the florist, crafts delicate narratives as she pulls them towards a theme bunch. She uses the present tense to a delicious effect, pulling the reader into the immediacy, and hence, the momentariness of her experiences. The beauty results from her love of language – the carefree abandon with which words spill onto the page.
-- Bhaswati Ghosh, Editor-at-large, Cafe Dissensus