Things Fall Apart: A Novel

Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children. Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo's fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father.

Achebe does not introduce the theme of colonialism until the last 50 pages or so. By then, Okonkwo has lost everything and been driven into exile. And yet, within the traditions of his culture, he still has hope of redemption. The arrival of missionaries in Umuofia, however, followed by representatives of the colonial government, completely disrupts Ibo culture, and in the chasm between old ways and new, Okonkwo is lost forever. Deceptively simple in its prose, Things Fall Apart packs a powerful punch as Achebe holds up the ruin of one proud man to stand for the destruction of an entire culture. --Alix Wilber

Product Description
This is Chinua Achebe's classic novel, with more than two million copies sold since its first U.S. publication in 1969. Combining a richly African story with the author's keen awareness of the qualities common to all humanity, Achebe here shows that he is "gloriously gifted, with the magic of an ebullient, generous, great talent." -- Nadine Gordimer

Chinua Achebe describes "Things Fall Apart" as a response to Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", which is, comparatively, a denser, perhaps less accessible read. The parallels are there: the ominous drumbeats Marlow describes as mingling with his heartbeat are here given a source and a context. We, as readers, are invited into the lives of the Ibo clan in Nigeria. We learn their customs, their beliefs, terms from their language. Okonkwo, the main character, is the perfect anti-hero. He is maybe Achebe's ultimate creation: flawed, angry, deeply afraid but outwardly fierce. To have given us a perfect hero would have been to sell the story of these people drastically short. Achebe's great achievement is in rendering them as humans, people we can identify with. So they don't dress like Americans, or share our religious beliefs. Who's to say which method is correct, or if there has to be a correct and incorrect way. Achebe provokes thoughtfulness and important questions. His narrative is easy to read structurally, but the story itself is painful and frustrating. It is worthy of its subject.

"Things Fall Apart" provoked some of the best classroom discussions I've ever experienced. As a reader, it has enriched my life. My thanks to Achebe for his marvelous contribution to literature. This book has a permanent place on my shelves.


Read This Book   April 16, 2000
167 out of 180 found this review helpful

The first two-thirds of "Things Fall Apart" is an affectionate description of the culture of an Ibo clan told from an insider's viewpoint, focusing on the life of Okonkwo, one of his tribe's most respected leaders. The customs and religion of the Ibo village are described with sympathy and simplicity, creating a sense of nostalgia for a way of life completely exotic to Western sensibilities, but making the reader feel the force and logic of a traditional culture seen from within. This idyllic description is clouded by the reader's awareness of the culture's fragility, a foreboding sense of pity and of looming disaster. Disaster comes, of course, in the shape of white missionaries. In the last part of the story, evangelizing Christians and English colonial administrators establish themselves in the Ibo village, and act to corrode and unravel the traditional life of the Ibo people. An escalating series of misunderstandings and conflicts between the whites and natives lead to the inevitable tragic ending. In the last paragraph of the novel, the perspective shifts suddenly to that of the English colonial adminstrator, and ends with one of the most powerful and affecting last lines of any novel I've read.

This book was thoroughly enjoyable, and I recommend it unreservedly.


Things Fall Into Place   September 21, 2004
Eric J. Lyman (Roma, Lazio Italy)
40 out of 41 found this review helpful


The more the reader thinks about Things Fall Apart, the more he becomes aware that the heart of a story is about the struggles of an individual and less about what is a compelling and unsentimental survey of Nigeria's Ibo culture just before the arrival of white settlers.

The story's protagonist is Okonkwo, who at first appears to be a model warrior and self-made man who slowly discovers that the attributes he believed would serve him well as an adult instead breed a fear of failure and profound frustration. He is a complex and heavy-handed head of his household who is at once sympathetic and cruel.

Most of the story is told before the actual appearance of the first white settlers, but their pending arrival hangs over the middle part of the book like a rain cloud. By the time it actually happens in the last 50 or so pages of the book, Okonkwo has been driven into exile, his life a shambles. He has only a slim hope of redemption, and that is shattered by the arrival of the settlers.

Okonkwo's story is a relevant one even at a time when cultural and political imperialism has turned away from Africa toward the Middle East, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. But more important than its relevance is its artistry: it is a deceptively simple epic tale somehow packed into just over 200 pages, and one of the most impressive first novels on record. Don't miss it.


Ultimately, Worthwhile for Recreating a Culture before Colonization   March 14, 2007
Reader in Tokyo
29 out of 31 found this review helpful

SPOILERS AHEAD:
This novel was set in the Igbo homeland in what is now southeastern Nigeria in the late 1800s/early 1900s. I read about three-quarters of the book before I could begin to appreciate it.

Up to then I'd disliked the main character, Okonkwo, an important person in the village whose major traits were harsh anger, pride and inflexibility, finding him one-sided and uninteresting. I felt the description was plodding and little of importance was happening, and wasn't greatly interested in the village life. Much of the novel was concerned mainly with his point of view, and his interactions with the other, relatively minor characters were unexciting. When a dramatic event occurred, such as his accidental shooting of a villager that led to his exile, it was described in a flat, undramatic tone that seemed inappropriate and puzzled me.

I couldn't help comparing this novel unfavorably with another I happened to be reading, Palace Walk, by Naguib Mahfouz, with its complex, many-sided protagonist, the many other strongly developed people in his family, the dramatic interaction between them, and the rich world around them that was reasonably familiar.

It was only after reading some background material on the Internet that I could begin to understand how Achebe's novel aimed to recreate a vibrant culture that had existed before colonization on its own terms, with its oral tradition, rituals and taboos, and guardian spirits, and show what had been lost. The focus on a period before colonization and the depiction of the whites as interlopers has been called innovative for its time. Likewise the use of language in the words of the villagers, instead of pidgin.

A scholar of African lit, Bernth Lindfors, has described the book like this: "Instead of representing Africa as a barbarous wilderness where savages lived in a permanent state of anarchy until the white man came bringing peace, law, order, religion, and a 'higher' form of civilization, Achebe showed how Africans led decent, moral lives in well-regulated societies that placed strict legal and religious constraints on human behavior. Indeed, according to Achebe, things did not fall apart in Africa until Europe intruded and set everything off balance by introducing alien codes which Africans were then told to live by. Europe did not bring light and peace . . . it brought chaos and confusion" (from the preface to the Anchor Book of Modern African Short Stories).

At the same time, Achebe showed how some elements from outside the traditional culture, such as Christianity, weren't merely imposed from above but appealed strongly to some of the Igbo, especially those at the bottom of the society, and those who felt the new religion was more powerful. And he showed that the traditional society had its own internal problems and was ripe for change. Achebe himself has been quoted as saying, "My sympathies were not entirely with Okonkwo . . . . Life just has to go on and if you refuse to accept changes, then, tragic though it may be, you are swept aside" (from Under African Skies: Modern African Stories).

The conventional action came almost entirely in the last quarter of the novel, when the encroaching missionaries, together with the trading culture and the colonizers' threat of force, began to overwhelm the village. Although I can't say I identified with the main character even by the end, by then I could better appreciate the loss of the village culture.


Potentially deadly, so be careful.   April 27, 2000
Samuel Chell (Kenosha,, WI United States)
22 out of 23 found this review helpful

Because it's easy to read but hard to interpret, Achebe's masterwork has become a fixture thoughout secondary and higher education. Unfortunately, its current status as a "classic text" as well as a multicultural icon threatens to make it merely another institutional artifact rather than the genuinely provocative text it is capable of being. Achebe does not gloss over the apparently savage, cruel, sexist practices of the Ibo people before the arrival of the white missionaries. Yet students are quick to overlook these tensions in the narrative, preferring to go for the "platitudes" about imperialism that they know are expected of them in the classroom devoted to assuring "diversity" is in the curriculum. The other "tension" that is often overlooked is one outside the text: respecting the autonomy and identity of an African country by staying out of its affairs vs. intervening to bring an end to mass genocide (Rwanda), starvation (Ethiopia), and enslavement of children (Sudan). Why is it a "moral imperative" for the West to interfere in Kosovo but not in Rwanda? If these tensions are not confronted, the novel is a well-crafted folk tale about a tragic hero, and also another occasion for student apathy. Achebe himself has invited strong moral judgements about his text by applying the same to Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."