Looking for an address

by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Chhanda Chattopadhyay Bewtra (Translator), Dipankar Ghosh (Illustrator)

Set in the 1990’s New York, when Rudy Giuliani was the Mayor and Bill Clinton was the President, Looking for an Address explores the lives of several South Asian Bengali men and women from both Bangladesh and India, and their interactions with ‘native born Americans’ like Gloria, Joshua, and Benjamin.

With her keen power of observation, Nabaneeta Dev Sen (‘Sahitya Akademi Awards’, 1999, 2019) depicts in this novel with touching sensitivity the intersection of the immigrants’ lives in New York as they search for their individual ‘addresses’. The notion of address gradually expands beyond the physical to embrace ‘refuge’ from racial disparity in case of Gloria--but what about Jhilli, a young woman from Kolkata who came to New York and Benjamin, a native New Yorker--what were they looking for?...

The translator, Dr. Chhanda Chattopadhyay Bewtra is Emerita Professor at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska. Her previous translations include novels by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay.

129 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

About the author

Nabaneeta Dev Sen is an award-winning Indian poet, novelist and academic. Sen has published more than 80 books in Bengali: poetry, novels, short stories, plays, literary criticism, personal essays, travelogues, humour writing, translations and children’s literature. Her short stories and travelogues are a rare combination of fine humour, deep human concern, and high intellect, which has made her a unique figure in the Bangla literary scene.

She is a well-known children's author in Bengali for her fairy tales and adventure stories, with girls as protagonist. She has also written prize-winning one-act plays.

Reviews

[Raj Aich · Rating 2 out of 5]

Amazing story but killed by a very poor translation.