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Things Fall Apart: A Novel (Paperback)
by Chinua Achebe
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A masterpiece highly praised for its intelligent and realistic treatment of tribal beliefs and of psychological disintegration coincident with social unraveling. |
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Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Anchor
Pub. in: September, 1994
ISBN: 0385474547
Pages: 224
Measurements: 8.0 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00450
Other information: 1st Anchor Books Ed edition
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- Awards & Credential -
A classic well ceceived with more than two million copies sold since its first U.S. publication in 1969. |
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- MSL Picks -
This is Chinua Achebe's classic novel, with more than two million copies sold since its first U.S. publication in 1969. Combining a richly African story with the author's keen awareness of the qualities common to all humanity, Achebe here shows that he is "gloriously gifted, with the magic of an ebullient, generous, great talent." - Nadine Gordimer
This is a novel of startling beauty and without a doubt one of the best novels ever written. However, I want to thank the reviewer who noted that in high school he or she did not appreciate the book as much as they did in college. I could see someone in high school being turned off by the book, particularly if they were not taught about Achebe's own intentions in creating the book's plot and characters.
For one thing, some reviewers seem not to understand that Achebe is not endorsing some of Okonkwo's character traits and see Okonkwo as some kind of chauvinistic cultural ideal of the pre-colonial African man. Rather, as Achebe has often said in interviews and essays, Okonkwo, and the entire portrait of his village was evoked to show both the beauty-and the flaws-of pre-colonial African society. As in all human societies, injustices were perpetrated.
Okonkwo, then, is someone Achebe feels for-and wants us to feel for-but who he feels is tragic due to his rigidity and other problems. He is not intended to be a figure for emulation at all. Indeed, at times Achebe demonstrates the narrowness of Okonkwo's thought and the reality that other cultural models of masculine behavior existed in Ibo society at the time. For instance, Okonkwo is shocked when he hears one of his friends note that a great Ibo village leader has died and that the man would never do anything without first consulting his wife. Confronted with the fact that not everyone took the narrow view of male/female relationships he did, Okonkwo shows incredulity. Achebe shows with carefully crafted, elegant and subtle language that Okonkwo has become so wedded to one vision of Ibo cultural identity that ultimately any change introduced into that society destroys him. He clings to one vision of masculinity in order to feel he has lived a life opposite to that of his father, who had a completely different disposition but died in poverty.
Some readers don't like the book, therefore, because they confuse Achebe's sympathy with Okonkwo for his endorsement of Okonkwo's behavior, which is completely different. That does not allieviate the pain we feel when Okonkwo is defeated by a society that refuses to acknowledge that the Ibo have a great history and society and demands he conform to the Western encroachment. When Okonkwo feels his society is so degraded that it can no longer exist he can no longer exist, either. Achebe knew that a cultural purist could not survive under colonialism, so he treats the case with deliberate ambiguity. We are as upset as Okonkwo's friend when he dies (I cried for days) and furious at the petty and ignorant summary the Englishman expresses at his death, his dispassionate arrogance that mistakes Okonkwo's national pride for some "primitive" superstition, but at the same time we know he couldn't have survived in a new world and he could not accomodate change, something Achebe thought was dangerous.
Achebe once said that if he could convince his fellow Africans through his novels that their history had not been "one long dark night" but rather a rich and complex tapestry of sophisticated cultural, religious, and artistic expressions he would have succeeded at his goal. He certainly succeeded - although precolonial Africa had many kingdoms, the Ibo were supposedly without a leader and therefore people assumed it meant that they were a "disorganized tribe". However Achebe's book demonstrates the meaning, internal organization, poetry, ritual, and traditions that all human societies have and this book, which shows a world of beauty gone forever, fulfills Achebe's noble goal of wanting to demonstrate the validity of African history and does so more than many history books I have read. Those history books are accurate, of course, but although they demonstrate what Achebe does they often do not pull you in emotionally, which is far more effective and I believe that is why everyone should read this book-perhaps not in high school, however. I don't know, I didn't have it assigned to me then, so I don't know if I would have appreciated its nuances as a teenager. But it's not worth alienating people who might otherwise pick it up. For adults, it's a read you can't put down and a work of singular beauty. FOR ADULTS IT IS NOT A DIFFICULT READ: I don't want anyone to get turned off by those who said it was, or to assume that it will be dense, hard to get through, or anything like that-its simple but potent language is one of its most amazing qualities.
It is the classic of the African continent, a tragic book that will lead any reader into a deeper understanding of colonialism, the colonial lie about "peoples without history",and Africa. Its richly rendered scenes are also some of the best written in the English language.
(By quoting Justice of USA)
Target readers:
General readers
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Chinua Achebe is a professor of language and literature at Bard College. He lives in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
Chinua Achebe was born in 1930 in the village of Ogidi in Eastern Nigeria. After studying medicine and literature at the University of Ibadan, he went to work for the Nigerian broadcasting company in Lagos. Things Fall Apart, his first novel was published in 1958. It sold over 2,000,000 copies, and has been translated into 30 languages. It was followed by No Longer at Ease, then Arrow of God (which won the first New Statesman Jock Campbell Prize), then A Man of the People (a novel dealing with post-independence Nigeria). Achebe has also written short stories and children's books, and Beware Soul Brother, a book of his poetry, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1972. Achebe has been at the Universities of Nigeria, Massachusetts and Connecticut, and among the many honours he has received are the award of a Fellowship of the Modern Language Association of America, and doctorates from the Universities of Stirling, Southampton and Kent.
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From Alix Wilber:
One of Chinua Achebe's many achievements in his acclaimed first novel, Things Fall Apart, is his relentlessly unsentimental rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after the coming of colonialism. First published in 1958, just two years before Nigeria declared independence from Great Britain, the book eschews the obvious temptation of depicting pre-colonial life as a kind of Eden. Instead, Achebe sketches a world in which violence, war, and suffering exist, but are balanced by a strong sense of tradition, ritual, and social coherence. His Ibo protagonist, Okonkwo, is a self-made man. The son of a charming ne'er-do-well, he has worked all his life to overcome his father's weakness and has arrived, finally, at great prosperity and even greater reputation among his fellows in the village of Umuofia. Okonkwo is a champion wrestler, a prosperous farmer, husband to three wives and father to several children. He is also a man who exhibits flaws well-known in Greek tragedy:
Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children. Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo's fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father.
And yet Achebe manages to make this cruel man deeply sympathetic. He is fond of his eldest daughter, and also of Ikemefuna, a young boy sent from another village as compensation for the wrongful death of a young woman from Umuofia. He even begins to feel pride in his eldest son, in whom he has too often seen his own father. Unfortunately, a series of tragic events tests the mettle of this strong man, and it is his fear of weakness that ultimately undoes him.
Achebe does not introduce the theme of colonialism until the last 50 pages or so. By then, Okonkwo has lost everything and been driven into exile. And yet, within the traditions of his culture, he still has hope of redemption. The arrival of missionaries in Umuofia, however, followed by representatives of the colonial government, completely disrupts Ibo culture, and in the chasm between old ways and new, Okonkwo is lost forever. Deceptively simple in its prose, Things Fall Apart packs a powerful punch as Achebe holds up the ruin of one proud man to stand for the destruction of an entire culture.
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| View all 9 comments |
H. Marcus (MSL quote), UK
<2007-01-10 00:00>
A big claim to make perhaps, but the rich, deceptively simple prose of Things Fall Apart packs an incredible punch, particularly with the devastating final chapter. For the first 100 pages, Achebe has given his people (he was born in Nigeria with an Ibo background) back their history, reclaiming the Nigerian identity: far from Joseph Conrad's Africans in Heart Of Darkness (quaint, godless, ignorant black people with long limbs and scary, rolling eyes) Achebe presents a culture of depth, traditions and parables that rival any Christian's in complexity, and people with unique personalities and (sometimes unpredictable) reactions. I almost screamed in disbelief when someone complained Achebe was being "biased" against white people: when you're describing the subjugation of a race, you don't qualify yourself with an "Oh well, I'm sure the white man thought he knew what was best for us," or a "Really, we black folks had it coming anyway."
And the final chapter: if such a thing as genius exists, it is here. Throughout Achebe has claimed the English language for himself, infusing it with an African-ness that sets it completely aside from an Englishman's prose. Yet the style of the last chapter is unmistakably English, could even have been lifted from 'Heart of Darkness'. Achebe shows WITHIN THE TEXT how the voice of the white colonisers silences, represses, and denies the voice of the colonised. The greatest evil done to Africa, Achebe argues, is that it was not allowed to tell its own story; that robbing people of their voice is the absolute oppression, and absolute enslavment. |
Mary Comer (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
Throughout most of Things Fall Apart Achebe describes the many traditions, rituals, and everyday happenings that occur in the villages of Ummuofia. For instance yams are of very high importance in the village, they even have yam festivals. Some of their beliefs seem strange, such as the belief in digging up a stone to cure an ogbanje, a dead child who returns to the other to be reborn. Others seem to coincide with our own laws, such as punishment for murder and distinction between murder and manslaughter. The main character, Okonkwo, accidentally commits murder and so he and his family are banished from the clan for seven years. After his banishment the "white men" come to his village. They are Christians who come with churches to try and convert the "heathens", but they also come with guns.
While the beginning of the book focused mainly on the many rituals of the clan, it was still quite interesting to read. Many of their ways seemed to coincide with ours. The way to treat iba, the fever, was to use medicinal steam and today the same idea is used in Vicks' humidifiers. Of course other remedies seem stranger, like digging up a rock to cure constant miscarriage, which surprisingly worked. It seemed the whole beginning half of the book was to slowly pull you into the story and have you feel you were part of the village. Around the fifteenth chapter the book begins to talk about the "white men" and the attempts the early church made to gain followers. This was the most exciting part of the book, especially the unrest in the villages building up until the people find that they must determine what to do now.
Outside of the book I would immediately say that imperialism hurt the Africans. However Things Fall Apart seems to portray other sides of imperealism. The District Commisioner and his aides seem as mean and horrible as you would expect them to be. Yet the missionaries seem much more. For instance Mr. Kiaga accepts osu, or outcasts, into the church and Mr. Brown sat with villagers to learn about their Gods and traditions. Even when the villagers assaulted some of the converts, the missionaries told them to be patient and not fight back. Aside from the ultimate suicide of Okonkwo, imperialism overall helped the people of Ibo. |
Elijia Chingosho (MSL quote), Kenya
<2007-01-10 00:00>
I read Things Fall Apart in my school days in the then Rhodesia. I immediately fell in love with the book because I could relate a lot with tribal life in my village and the various forces that were impacting on it. The customs, rituals and beliefs were very similar. The impact of white missionaries on the lives of people in my village was also very powerful and caused a lot of clashes with the local people's way of life. Things all around us were changing, exposing the fragility of our culture, resulting in inevitable conflicts.
The main character, Okonkwo, was a respected and powerful village hero. However, as we progress with reading the book, he is struck with tragedies which ultimately consume him because of his inability to cope with change. This book had a profound influence on me and made me appreciate the intellectual talent within the continent.
The book is a must read for people on the African continent where strong traditional beliefs still have a firm hold in a time of breathtaking changes wrought about by the unstoppable globalization process. The ability of African people to stop or significantly influence the pace, direction and extend of change is very limited. The tragedies that befell Okonkwo are continuing but in different forms on the continent. This is largely due to the failure to adapt to change and failure to appreciate that, however much we firmly hold and justify some of our beliefs, we cannot force others to agree with us and if we try, we will fail anyway.
An important lesson from this book is the echoing of Charles Darwin's conclusion that it is not the strongest of the species or the most intelligent that will survive in a changing environment, but those species that can best adapt to change. |
Cecelia Connally (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
This book was recommended to me while I was visiting Africa. I subsequently found out that it is widely used in highschools, colleges and universitites. I have to admit that ordering the Cliff Notes along with the book was a wise decision and you can note from my many other reviews on Amazon that I am a sophisticated reader. Things Fall Apart is not always easy to follow. Reading the Cliff Notes along with the book helped me with some of the underlying meanings and also verified that I had to correct understanding of some of the situations.
I believe that if there is one major theme in the book, its the clash of cultures. We as westerners always identify with the westerners who make first contact with people of other cultures. As a result it hard to identify with other cultures. Things Fall Apart gives you that chance to understand other religions and how other people life. But it also gives you the opportunity to think about basic concepts of right and wrong. While the book takes place in Africa, the situations can be compared to other religions and other clashes of culture.
At first glance we think it absurd for the tribe to blindly follow the word of the oracles. But then think of situations in other religions and other times when people blindly followed the directions of a dictator or religious leaders. The bottom line is that there is much room for discussion in this book.
It is unfortunate that a few students wrote reviews of this book panning it. Apparently they did only did a superficial reading of the book. Or possibly did not get a good background lecture from their teachers.
This would be a great book for discussion in a book club. It is for the serious reader. It makes the reader reflect on his or her own life and culture and wonder what decisions you would make if faced with the same situation. Are there basic concepts of right and wrong that go beyond the demands of culture? Did Okonkwo's failure come about as a result of his going against those basic conflicts? Read the book and make up your own mind.
Although this is a book about early contact between Europeans and primitive African peoples it is not about first contact. You will note that Okonkwo has a gun which he obviously got from a European. That gun contributes significantly to his down fall. A good topic for discussion is the influence of guns in the story. |
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