The Foreigner

Arun Joshi

Hul 2021 · Orient Paperbacks

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The Foreigner is a story of a young man who is detached, almost alienated — a man who sees himself as a stranger wherever he lives or goes — in Kenya, where he is born, in England and USA where he is a student and in India where he finally settles down. His detachment transcends barriers of geography, nationality and culture. It propels him from one crisis to another, sucking in the wake several other people, including June, an attractive American with whom he has a short lived but passionate affair.

The transitoriness associated with the word 'foreigner' permeates the novel and is handled with remarkable maturity reminding the reader of epoch-making The Outsider by Albert Camus. The protagonist's anguish at the meaninglessness of the human condition and the eventual release from the anxieties of life through karmayoga, the principle of action without attachment, add to the aesthetics of the work.

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Arun Joshi (1939-1993) was a novelist of outstanding repute whose absorbing novels delved into existentialism while integrating the Indian tradition of introspection. His fiction blended concepts and ideas with reality conveyed through an expression that is at once sensitive and articulate, luminous and striking.

Son of a botanist and eminent educationist, Joshi was a brilliant student. He obtained a Masters degree from MIT on a scholarship. Returning to India, he headed the Shri Ram Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, New Delhi. He established his credentials as a writer of rare sensitivity and exceptional talent with a string of novels. The Last Labyrinth (1981) won him India’s highest literary award — the Sahitya Akademi Award.

'Arun Joshi has evolved a style and thematic approach uniquely his own. His prose is at once as felicitous as it is flawless.' — Khushwant Singh