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Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1953
Aug. 31st, 2017 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yatimaContent warnings for intimate partner violence and child murder.
I struggled with this one a lot. There is no denying that Things Fall Apart is a masterpiece, beautifully and hauntingly written, harnessing all the power of the English language to condemn British colonialism with the stark authority of first-hand experience. It's an immense achievement of reclamation that paves the way for the work of the Nigerian and Nigerian-American writers that I unreservedly love: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi and Nnedi Okorafor.
Things Fall Apart is also profoundly of its time. The central character Okonkwo, who is brought so vividly to life, is a violently abusive husband and the murderer of his foster son. His sheer awfulness does not detract from the majesty of the story, which evokes both the tribal society of the Igbo and its wrenching fracture. It does, though, make it difficult to spend a lot of time with Okonkwo. This is an important book as the near-contemporaneous The Naked and the Dead and The Old Man and the Sea are important: just be prepared to grit your teeth through way too much period-appropriate misogyny.
I struggled with this one a lot. There is no denying that Things Fall Apart is a masterpiece, beautifully and hauntingly written, harnessing all the power of the English language to condemn British colonialism with the stark authority of first-hand experience. It's an immense achievement of reclamation that paves the way for the work of the Nigerian and Nigerian-American writers that I unreservedly love: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi and Nnedi Okorafor.
Things Fall Apart is also profoundly of its time. The central character Okonkwo, who is brought so vividly to life, is a violently abusive husband and the murderer of his foster son. His sheer awfulness does not detract from the majesty of the story, which evokes both the tribal society of the Igbo and its wrenching fracture. It does, though, make it difficult to spend a lot of time with Okonkwo. This is an important book as the near-contemporaneous The Naked and the Dead and The Old Man and the Sea are important: just be prepared to grit your teeth through way too much period-appropriate misogyny.
