Absent. The English Teacher

ISBN: 9781779220820 出版年：2009 页码：166 Eppel, John Weaver Press

When Mr George loses his job teaching English at a private secondary school in Bulawayo, ehis pension payout, after forty years of full-time service, bought him two jam doughnuts and a soft tomato.i 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 Georgeis lessons on Shakespeare, John Eppel draws down the curtain on one particular white man in Africa. But before itis time to go, George will delight us with the antics of his literature classes; his various arrests n all timed to coincide with the police chiefis 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 familyis 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.