First published in England in 1958, THINGS FALL APART is Chinua Achebe's first and most famous novel, a classic of modern African writing. It is the story of a "strong' mand whose life is dominated by fear and anger, a powerful and moving narrative that critics have compared with classic Greek tragedy. Written with remarkable economy and subtle irony, it is uniquely and richly African and at the same time reveals Achebe's keen awareness of the human qualities common to men of all times and places.
THINGS FALL APART is no less successful as a social document, dramatizing traditional Ibo life in its first encounter with colonialism and Christianity at the turn of this century. Set in an Ibo village in Nigeria, the novel vividly recreates pre-Christian tribal life and shows how the coming of the white man led to the breaking up of the old ways.
This is the case of three stars is too low four stars is too high. I like this book though I didn't think it was fun to read. It was a book that everybody had to read in my high school but in the year before I started. I can understand why it was designed and I'm glad it was but I feel the telling of the story has matured over the years thanks to other authors. That said it was an important book in the culture and should continue to be read because it introduced Western world to The narrative of the negative effects of colonialism
As the title suggests, this is a story about a world that is about to endure irrevocable changes. The main character in particular, a self-made man with many honors but at least as many flaws, is pushed to the breaking point, with heartbreaking results. Chinua Achebe's prose is eloquent, steeping us in the culture of this Nigerian tribe as if we are invited guests. This is a novel I will likely read more than once.
The silver lining in my personal Covid-19 lockdown has been my re-engagement with reading fiction; pursuing two degrees in History on a part-time basis while working full-time meant that whatever spare time I had was more profitably spent in reading around my subject rather than reading for pleasure. The conclusion of my studies and the enforced restriction of movement has therefore opened up an opportunity for me to read purely for the pleasure of reading, and as a consequence I have finally got around to reading books, like Things Fall Apart, that have been on my mental 'to read' list for far too long.
All I really knew about this book before reading it was always hearing this book described as being the first post-colonial novel. So it was with very little in the way of pre-conceptions that I read this book. I found the novel well written, and felt …
The silver lining in my personal Covid-19 lockdown has been my re-engagement with reading fiction; pursuing two degrees in History on a part-time basis while working full-time meant that whatever spare time I had was more profitably spent in reading around my subject rather than reading for pleasure. The conclusion of my studies and the enforced restriction of movement has therefore opened up an opportunity for me to read purely for the pleasure of reading, and as a consequence I have finally got around to reading books, like Things Fall Apart, that have been on my mental 'to read' list for far too long.
All I really knew about this book before reading it was always hearing this book described as being the first post-colonial novel. So it was with very little in the way of pre-conceptions that I read this book. I found the novel well written, and felt it really introduced me to characters and into a culture and way of life that on the one hand is completely different to anything that I have encountered before, and yet on the other hand I found underlying aspects of the human condition with which I could more readily identify, and this was probably the most significant thing I took from this book. The central character, Okonkwo, was in a number of ways difficult to like: he often uses violence, including on women and youngsters, to define and express himself. While these actions are hard for me to see as acceptable, the point is of course that they are not in my context and Okonkwo's 'choice' of actions are arguably dictated to him by his gender, his position as head of his family and within his village society, and so on. His problems, and the book's dramatic development, really expand when conciously or unconciously he acts outside of these expectations, or comes into contact with cultural expectations which are totally alien to him (that is Christian, and European). In reading this book it did invite a consideration of culture clash, and personal perspectives upon it.
Wow. For the first half of this book I thought it a bit artless and frustrating, but it turns into a very much cleverer and more subtle work than I had been expecting. Ultimately the book is utterly damning about colonialism without ever romanticising what came before it.
I feel weird tagging "spoilers" about a book the outlines of which are pretty well known, and the plot of which is basically described in the publisher blurb, but in spite of all that there were some surprises as I went, so here goes:
First of all, there is one thing that annoyed me intensely through the entire book: the complete lack of any development of female characters or voices. I can imagine a defence of that in terms of the book describing two intensely patriarchal cultures and their meeting, but I'm still digesting Achebe's critique of Conrad. One of his more …
Wow. For the first half of this book I thought it a bit artless and frustrating, but it turns into a very much cleverer and more subtle work than I had been expecting. Ultimately the book is utterly damning about colonialism without ever romanticising what came before it.
I feel weird tagging "spoilers" about a book the outlines of which are pretty well known, and the plot of which is basically described in the publisher blurb, but in spite of all that there were some surprises as I went, so here goes:
First of all, there is one thing that annoyed me intensely through the entire book: the complete lack of any development of female characters or voices. I can imagine a defence of that in terms of the book describing two intensely patriarchal cultures and their meeting, but I'm still digesting Achebe's critique of Conrad. One of his more on-point criticisms is that Conrad writes about colonialism in Africa without ever giving a single African character a real voice - it's fair, but then it rankles to see Achebe do exactly the same thing to women, especially in a book that's partly about brutal patriarchy.
The first part of the book, describing the traditional society that existed before colonisation, is an interesting mixture of pastoral and horrifying. It's not hard to see how people would value what they had, and find its disruption by outside forces intensely painful, but there's also plenty about it that is terrible. Not only the status of women (property whose only apparent chance at any agency at all is by cheating on the husband they didn't necessarily get to choose), but murder of twins, mutilation of sick childrens' corpses, and casting out of men who don't fit a very specific mould. At first I was frustrated by Achebe's stalwart refusal to allow a hint of judgement on any of this; by the end I saw it as a real strength of his writing.
Once things do start to fall apart, I came to appreciate that by keeping any editorialising out of the way, Achebe was able to let his characters and story say all that needed to be said about their own society. The real genius of the book is in its dissection of how weaknesses in the existing culture allowed missionaries to make inroads, how effectively the missionaries manipulated this (often without seeming to understand what they were doing), and yet how disastrous this all was for the people it happened to in spite of the completely unvarnished portrayal of what they had before.
