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2011 Book Review #91: Things Fall Apart
Title: Things Fall Apart
Author: Chinua Achebe
Genre: Postcolonial political fiction
Thingummies: 4 (5 for political significance, 3 for how much I actually enjoyed it)
Synopsis: An angry African warrior tries to fight back as his tribe is assimilated into Christianity.
Thoughts: I wanted to like this, I really did. I do respect it. The portrait of the African village, both before and after white colonialism sweeps over it, is fascinating. The culture is treated respectfully but fairly, celebrating the things which are lost but giving good evidence why many of the villagers would prefer to adopt Christianity rather than keep their original culture. (The women whose twin babies are abandoned in the forest as unclean and the outcasts who were given to the gods as infants and made permanent social lepers as a result have little to lose by joining a religion that says every life is sacred and equal. Never mind that the Christians disobey their own rules.) The protagonist seriously needs some anger management classes and is not particularly sympathetic--however, it is clear that he tries to be a good man in his own way and he is very much a product of his own culture.
I think part of the problem I had was that I never could warm up to him, despite understanding him. A more likeable protagonist might have led me to feel more of the horror and sadness at the destruction of this culture--I pitied many of the minor characters. But Okonkwo himself is not a very nice person, even by his own culture's standards.
I also had some trouble with the prose. It reminded me a lot of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (although this book is very much the predecessor of the other). There's a simplicity of grammar and description that feels artificial to me. Achebe is a Nigerian--this is not a case of Europeans condescending to Africans. He uses a Yeats quote as his title and clearly thinks in a very sophisticated way. But the very simple language feels as if it is a claim that the characters are very simple, unsophisticated people. Which feels to me as if it sells the villagers short. But as a white American reader, I'm not sure I have the right to comment. It did make me uncomfortable, wondering if I was allowing my view of both African tribes and writers to be oversimplified and childish. To be fair, Hemingway also favored exceedingly, deceptively simple language--but that frequently annoys me as well. So I suppose putting it on the same level as Hemingway is not so bad. In the end, I feel educated having read this novel, but I didn't much like it.
Author: Chinua Achebe
Genre: Postcolonial political fiction
Thingummies: 4 (5 for political significance, 3 for how much I actually enjoyed it)
Synopsis: An angry African warrior tries to fight back as his tribe is assimilated into Christianity.
Thoughts: I wanted to like this, I really did. I do respect it. The portrait of the African village, both before and after white colonialism sweeps over it, is fascinating. The culture is treated respectfully but fairly, celebrating the things which are lost but giving good evidence why many of the villagers would prefer to adopt Christianity rather than keep their original culture. (The women whose twin babies are abandoned in the forest as unclean and the outcasts who were given to the gods as infants and made permanent social lepers as a result have little to lose by joining a religion that says every life is sacred and equal. Never mind that the Christians disobey their own rules.) The protagonist seriously needs some anger management classes and is not particularly sympathetic--however, it is clear that he tries to be a good man in his own way and he is very much a product of his own culture.
I think part of the problem I had was that I never could warm up to him, despite understanding him. A more likeable protagonist might have led me to feel more of the horror and sadness at the destruction of this culture--I pitied many of the minor characters. But Okonkwo himself is not a very nice person, even by his own culture's standards.
I also had some trouble with the prose. It reminded me a lot of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (although this book is very much the predecessor of the other). There's a simplicity of grammar and description that feels artificial to me. Achebe is a Nigerian--this is not a case of Europeans condescending to Africans. He uses a Yeats quote as his title and clearly thinks in a very sophisticated way. But the very simple language feels as if it is a claim that the characters are very simple, unsophisticated people. Which feels to me as if it sells the villagers short. But as a white American reader, I'm not sure I have the right to comment. It did make me uncomfortable, wondering if I was allowing my view of both African tribes and writers to be oversimplified and childish. To be fair, Hemingway also favored exceedingly, deceptively simple language--but that frequently annoys me as well. So I suppose putting it on the same level as Hemingway is not so bad. In the end, I feel educated having read this novel, but I didn't much like it.
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Achebe also wrote a very good rebuttal of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which is worth a read. Basically, people ask him his opinion of that book all the time (African literature...Heart of Darkness!), so his essay is an explanation of why, no, it's not great literature that is a little bit racist, it's racist literature and not worthy of study.
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That's interesting--I'll have to see if I can hunt up the essay.