Book One of The Ocean and the Waves presents the drama of an affluent extended family in the state of Andhra Pradesh, on the east coast of India, breaking up. Narayan, the only son of the distinguished Ramanatham, the elder of the two brothers in the family, becomes a saint eventually and lives in a bungalow on a hill at the foot of which the breakers dash their heads in hysteric frenzy.
Book Two presents an authentic account of the devastating cyclonic storm and the killer-wave of November 19, 1977, which took a toll of several thousand lives. At the centre of this book is Narayan, the adept yogi of our times, who inspires the narrator and instructs him in the art of hearing the still small voice within and establishing a regular communion with it.
The novel presents a storyteller actively engaged in researching the subject he is interested in writing about and reflecting on his own work, which adds a metafictional dimension to the novel.
Now please open the book and meet the narrator travelling in a crowded bus to keep his tryst with destiny.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR P.G. Rama Rao
P.G. Rama Rao retired from the P.G. Dept. of English, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar in 1995 after a long and distinguished innings as a teacher of English and American Literature. His Ph.D. thesis on Hemingway’s Narrative Technique and his article on “The Snows of Kilimanjaro†were highly acclaimed in Sixteen Modern American Authors (Duke Univ. Press, 1974). A Fulbright Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor in the University of Massachusetts, he studied the Hemingway manuscripts in John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in 1981-82 and 1993, taught the Hemingway course in the University of Massachusetts, and delivered lectures in several American universities. In 1986, on a British Council grant, he visited Oxford and Edinburgh universities, where he delivered a series of lectures. He participated in the M.L.A. Convention and the Hemingway Conference in New York in December 1981, and in the Second and Third International Hemingway Conferences in Italy (1986) and Austria (1988) respectively. Dr. Rao supervised the Doctoral Research of many scholars and published a large number of research papers and articles, some of which were included in learned anthologies. Among his publications are The Poetic Rapture (1963), Ernest Hemingway: A Study in Narrative Technique (1980), Narrative Technique in British and American Fiction (1986) and The Critic’s Eye (1993).
There are no reviews yet.