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.