The English Teacher - Softcover

R. K. Narayan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099282283 ISBN 13: 9780099282280

Publisher: Vintage Books, 2006

Synopsis

This novel completes the informal trilogy which began with "Swami and Friends" and "The Bachelor of Arts," The protagonist, Krishna, is an English teacher at the same college he had attended as a student. Although Krishna has recently married, his wife Susila and their daughter live with his parents-in-law some miles away. The story opens with his immediate family deciding to join him in Malgudi. Krishna is initially frightened by his new state of affairs, but he soon finds that his love for both his wife and child grows deeper than he could have imagined.
"Mr. Narayan has repeatedly been compared with Chekhov. Ordinarily such comparisons are gratuitous and strained, but in this case there are such clear and insistent echoes that any careful reader will be aware of them. There is that sense of rightness which transcends mere structure. There is the inexplicable blending of tragedy and humor. Most of all, there is a brooding awareness of fate which makes the story seem not authored, but merely translated."--J.F. Muehl, "Saturday Review"
"[Narayan] does not deal in exemplary fates, and the Western novel's machinery of retribution is far too grandiose for him. . . . In Narayan's world, scores are not settled but dissolved, recycled, restated. 'Both of us will shed our forms soon and perhaps we could meet again, who knows? So goodbye for the present.' These are the concluding words for the novel "A Tiger for Malgudi," but they constitute a universal epilogue one could append to most of Narayan's fiction."--Russell Davies, "Times Literary Supplement"

About this title

About the Author

R K Narayan's writing spans the greatest period of change in modern Indian history, from the days of the Raj - Swami and Friends (1935), The Bachelor of Arts (1937) and The English Teacher (1945) - to recent years of political unrest - The Painter of Signs (1976), A Tiger for Malgudi (1983), and Talkative Man (1987). He has published numerous collections of short stories, including Malgudi Days (1982), and Under the Banyan Tree (1985), and several works of non-fiction.

Review

"Narayan wakes in me a spring of gratitude, for he has offered me a second home. Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian" * Graham Greene * "Narayan's humour and compassion come from a deep universal well, with the result that he has transformed his imaginary township of Malgudi into a bubbling parish of the world" * Observer * "In his humour and compassion, Narayan comes close to being a twentieth-century Indian Chekhov" * Sunday Telegraph * "RK Narayan's Malgudi novels are humorous gems and it is a great pity that they are not better known. He wrote beautifully and with great compassion, something regrettably lacking in some humorous writing" -- Alexander McCall Smith "An idyll as delicious as anything I have met in modern literature for a long time. The atmosphere and texture of happiness, and, above all, its elusiveness, have seldom been so perfectly transcribed." -- Elizabeth Bowen

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0099282283
• ISBN 13: 9780099282280
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 180