2008 books
Nov. 20th, 2008 08:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peteryoung
76) Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1958
I wasn't as impressed with Things Fall Apart as I'd hoped I'd be. This most famous of African novels is a slow read, often with its momentum lost to seemingly superfluous chapters about everyday village life, and the protagonist Okonkwo is a thoroughly dislikeable character for whom it's hard to find any sympathy. But this is obviously to view it through Western eyes, and Africans probably see and experience the story differently. As the indomitable Okonkwo's life is thrown ever more off-balance at the hands of his own arbitrary tribal customs and the simultaneous arrival of the British colonists, there's an elegiac inevitability about it all that says this a story that needed to be told, which accounts for the book's unending popularity. I didn't dislike it – there are some enlightening passages as well as some repellent political and dogmatic naïveties – it's just one of those classics that left me asking "Is that all there is?"
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Date: 2008-11-20 09:19 am (UTC)no subject
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