Fabulous reads – A powerful memoir: honest, funny and sad
Book review - There Goes English Teacher by Karin Cronje.
There Goes English Teacher, Karin Cronje, Modjaji BooksFormat, ISBN: 978-1-928215-61-5
CAPE TOWN award-winning author, Karin Cronje, bares her heart and soul and gives an authentic account of her experience teaching English in South Korea.
As a middle-aged Afrikaans writer, struggling to finish her new novel, and battling financially, she heads off to the unknown to teach at a hangwon (private institute) in a village.
And this is where it gets really interesting as her middle-age crisis is exacerbated in a foreign country where she feels completely alien.
She describes losing her identity in this land where nothing is familiar hard-wired honesty.We feel her deep sadness and existential crisis as she navigates her daily life and learns how to survive and orientate herself in this foreign environment.
She soldiers on and it is her humour, and the ironic observations she makes, that glimmer like the first rays of morning sunshine.
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She eventually returns to Cape Town where she must now-re-adapt and it is here where she loses the plot completely as revealed by her disastrous decisions.
She did manage to finish her book, but became entwined with her main characters, another layer of her psyche she resolves.
A book that hits home with its author’s sincere voice and it’s many levels are intriguing.
About the author
Karin Cronje is a part-time lecturer in the Music Literacy Department of Stellenbosch University. She teaches academic literacy and works with trainee band conductors. Her first novel, Vir ‘n Pers Huis (1998) Human & Rousseau, was widely debated. Her second novel, Alles Mooi Weer (2008) Genugtig! written in both Afrikaans and English, won the Jan Rabie/Rapport Prize. Karin lives in Cape Town.
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