Jim Grimsley

No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The title of this novel is curious, encapsulating the pervasive discomfort of the most modern period of Africa in Achebe’s trilogy. Obi Okonkwo, descendant of the protagonist of the first novel, has been sent to England to be educated in the Western manner so that he can join the bureaucracy in Nigeria; the people who sent him are the members of an Igbo social club who have organized to retain their collective identity in their new urban surroundings. They have pooled their money for Obi’s education and look on him as an investment for their own future, a sign that their people can cope with the new order as well as their neighbors have. This is a parallel to Ezeulu sending his own son to be educated in Christian ways in Arrow of God, and in the same way as the earlier novel the end result is not predictable or simple. Obi learns too much in his sojourn in England and is no longer quite of his people when he returns. He joins the civil service but sees its corruption, officials taking bribes at every turn. In fact the book begins with Obi’s arrest and conviction for taking a bribe himself, so that his downfall is already complete at the start, and the novel backtracks to show the disintegration that preceded his crime. He never intends to be dishonest but his moral character is not strong. As is usual with Achebe, the novel does not depict these events in a didactic or heavy-handed manner; we simply witness Obi’s life as though we were perched on his shoulder. The book is skillful but much less engaging than the earlier novels because it is a study of weakness and uncertainty; Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart may be caught up in his own blindness but he has great purpose, bent as it is; and Ezeulu in the second novel is a pillar of surety. Obi, by contrast, has lost his sense of who he is and his trajectory is downward. This kind of novel suffers from Achebe’s detachment. He is meticulous in cataloguing Obi’s small and continuous failures without creating much sense of empathy. In this kind of novel it would be better to offer more of his feelings, his interior, which was never necessary in the earlier books. It is nevertheless a fine book, but not a fine read. But it is a true depiction of what has been implied from the beginning of the cycle by the changes that overtake the Ten Towns and Nigeria through contact with Britain.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a book I have read at least a half dozen times, most recently a couple of weeks ago when I decided to read Achebe’s entire African Trilogy. When I first took up the novel, it taught me what simplicity of style could achieve. Achebe can write gracefully and sometimes lyrically but he is not very much interested in that side of language. I don’t mean that he has no interest in writing well. His purpose, I think, is to be clear, and to write plainly about a vanishing life, and through that, about all vanishing lives. His particular focus is to capture the way these people speak to one another, in parables and references to shared storie. The protagonist Okonkwo and his people have an intricate, ceremonial, specific life that they live. His world encompasses a few miles in every direction, a small cosmos of peoples, villages, kinship relations, gods, ghosts, families, obligations. Achebe employs a kind of omniscience in the telling of this story that remains tightly focused on the people of Okonkwo’s village. The characters are rich even though their part in the novel is often small. Achebe is not writing a psychological novel though he does illuminate the psychology of his protagonist. The book focuses on the story of Okonkwo’s obsessive sense of duty to himself, to his image in the community, and to the traditions of his ancestors; he is particularly interested in wiping away the memory of his slackard father from village memory. The appearance of
Christian missionaries in the second part of the book add the layer of disintegration to the already complex story. You understand that you are watching a way of life that is facing a drastic transformation. For such a slim volume to contain such a vast world, a whole cosmos in fact, is a feat that is belied by the simplicity of the book. This novel is always in my top ten list.

The House by the Churchyard by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When you read the work of a good writer, you feel its distinctiveness, and if the book is a surprise to you, it feels as if there is nothing else like it. I had read Sheridan stories years ago but had never cracked this book until recently. What a treat to read something so sure-handed! The world of Chapelizod unveils itself as if it were the center of everything, a village and countryside quite taken with itself. Sheridan colors every foible of each person we encounter: there are the mysterious figures in the background, of course, but it is the foreground where the book takes flight. There are so many people, such an ensemble, Puddock and Aunt Becky, Magnolia and her mother, the two doctors and their wives, the virtuous Lily, the tremulous Gertrude, the sleepwalker gentry, the wicked old witch. Lovely rich portraits. Having read only Le Fanu’s shorter works before, I found his sprawling Irish village to be a world unto itself, as rich as any such locale in any novel I remember. His focus is so drawn to the periphery, to the comic possibilities of nearly every character we meet, even the slightest, that the novel nearly forgets itself. The story of the villain and the hero, with all its tinge of the supernatural, is secondary to the landscape. Le Fanu was more fascinated by Chapelizod than by the mystery that dutifully appears and resolves; it’s not that this aspect of the book is bad, it’s just that the world overshadows the story so completely, through Le Fanu’s really wonderful eye and ear. The book does require patience, and you need a taste for the leisurely manner of the writing.

Chronicle in Stone by Ismail Kadare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those books that makes its own ground; told through a child’s consciousness, the novel explores the life of a city prior to and during World War II. But describing it in that way tells you nothing about the book, which is about the life of the city as much as it is the life of the child, and about many of the specific people in the city, and the pattern of life in the city, and the legends of the city, and the history… One of those books that does something not quite like anything else I’ve read. It reminded me of magical realism, though I think that’s a tired term; the book echoed fairy-tale atmosphere, but the magic in it intersects with the real history of the Italian, Greek, and German invasions of Albania, grounding the fantasy-feeling into the harsh reality of warfare. The writing is full of concise, aphoristic sentences that I read two or three times before moving on, savoring them, letting the thoughts sit in my head, enlarging. It’s that kind of prose, the words linger. But there is nothing heavy-handed or strained; the whole book feels effortless. A bit of magic. The edition of the book I read had a couple of cover-quotes that talked about the primitivity of Albania, which was curious since the word would never had occurred to me in relation to the book. The novel simply chronicled the life of the stone city that still feels, as I think about it, as if it has stood on its mountainside forever, and still stands there, in spite of everything.

The pile of books I have been meaning to read has begun to shrink. It is a virtual pile, not an actual one. I gave up on the physical pile and shelved all the books stacked there. Well, truth be told, there were several stacks. There were the books I bought in batches, there were the books I was given by friends on holidays and birthdays. Free books that arrived in the mail from publishers as part of their marketing. Occasional boxes of books from my publishers, or gifts gathered during visits to my editor. Not all the books are what I would have selected for myself but they are mine and it is a sin not to read a book I think or at least try to read it, and so here I am, now that I have time. Sampling and choosing. It is a very welcome era, reading steadily again, but as I write about each of the books it looks to be drawn from an odd old-fashioned eclecticism. That’s part of what makes it fun. I am reading in a way that feels partly chosen and partly random, discovering authors, pleased by most of them. Since I am a nitpicker when it comes to books, the result is always mixed. Something to quibble with. But it is lovely to discover that reading is the same thing for me now as it was when I first started. Not quite as magical, surely. Rarely do I get lost in a book so utterly. Remembering my early days of reading Robert Heinlein, especially. But I fall into the rhythm of reading anyway. I have more patience with difficult books, quirky books, than in the past. Retirement brings that ease of days so I am no longer, at least not so often, chased by the worry that I need to be doing something else. The stack of books to be read is not infinite. I will reach the end. Then I will be free to choose new books, make a new pile. Oh, let it be so.