Things Fall Apart

The main character in this novel, Okonkwo, is pictured as a strong, sometimes cruel, tribesman. Ironically, however, he is inwardly consumed by fear of failure, which is deeper than his fear of the whimsical gods, fear of the ‘forest’, and the fear of having a reputation resembling that of his father’s. He, too, is sympathetic, being fond of his eldest daughter, who he wished she were a boy, and of a young boy sent from another village into under his care as a compensation for the death of a young woman from Okonkwo’s village. The novel tells the falling from grace of Okonkwo and of clash of cultures when missionaries from Europe arrive.

The novel is a sort of a fictionalized historical account of pre-colonial life in an Ibo village in Nigeria. Chinua Achebe, who won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize, has made a masterpiece out of this novel.

(September 16, 2009)