Absent. The English Teacher: The English Teacher

by John Eppel

Overview

When Mr George loses his job teaching English at a private secondary school in Bulawayo, his pension payout, after forty years of full-time service, bought him two jam doughnuts and a soft tomato. When he backs his uninsured white Ford Escort into a brand new Mercedes Benz, the out-of-court settlement sees him giving up his house to the complainant, Beauticious Nyamayakanuna, and becoming her domestic servant. Through the prism of this engaging post-colonial role reversal, and spiced with George s lessons on Shakespeare, John Eppel draws down the curtain on one particular white man in Africa. But before it s time to go, George will delight us with the antics of his literature classes; his various arrests all timed to coincide with the police chief s need for help with essays on Hamlet and A Grain of Wheat; his keen eye for flora and fauna; and the long trek back through the hundred years of his family s Zimbabwean past, as he returns an abandoned child to her home. Eppel has satirized the racial politics of southern Africa in many of his previous novels. In Absent: The English Teacher he turns his gaze inwards for a generous and richly rewarding parody of the land of his birth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781779221858
Publisher:	Weaver Press
Publication date:	10/15/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	164
File size:	629 KB

About the Author

In addition to writing short stories, John Eppel is also an award-winning poet and novelist. His first novel, D.G.G. Berry’s The Great North Road (1992), won the M-Net Prize in South Africa. His second novel, Hatchings (1993), was short-listed for the M-Net Prize and his third novel, The Giraffe Man (1994), has been translated into French. His first poetry collection, Spoils of War (1989), won the Ingrid Jonker Prize.