Chinua Achebe – “Things Fall Apart”

The latest edition of the NAEL has replaced Achebe’s debut novel (and probably his most famous) Things Fall Apart with a short story of his, so I will do both. The novel is set among the Igbo in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but it is subtly aimed at the Western reader, as its title and epigraph from Yeats’ “The Second Coming” suggest. The references to cultural customs are also much more detailed than they would be for readers who simply knew them from their own lives. The novel’s protagonist is Okonkwo, a local Igbo leader who first became famous when, at the age of eighteen, he defeated a previously unbeaten wrestler. That was twenty years ago, and now Okonkwo is a tough man with a spring in his step who has no patience for unsuccessful men, including his own father. His father, Unoka, who died ten years ago, was a reckless loser whose main hobbies were playing the flute and getting drunk on palm wine bought with borrowed money.