Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe [70]
Essays/978-0-307-47367-7
GIRLS AT WAR
And Other Stories
Here we read of an ambitious farmer who is suddenly shunned by his village when a madman exacts his humiliating revenge; a young nanny who is promised an education by her well-to-do employers, only to be cruelly cheated out of it; and in three fiercely observed stories about the Nigerian civil war, we are confronted with the economic, ethnic, cultural, and religious tensions that continue to rack modern Africa.
Fiction/Short Stories/978-0-385-41896-6
HOME AND EXILE
More personally revealing than anything Achebe has written, Home and Exile is a major statement on the importance of stories as real sources of power, especially for those whose stories have traditionally been told by outsiders. In three elegant essays, Achebe seeks to rescue African culture from narratives written about it by Europeans. Looking through the prism of his experiences as a student in English schools in Nigeria, he provides devastating examples of European cultural imperialism. He examines the impact that his novel Things Fall Apart had on efforts to reclaim Africa’s story. And he argues for the importance of writing and living the African experience because, he believes, Africa needs stories told by Africans.
Essays/978-0-385-72133-2
HOPES AND IMPEDIMENTS
Selected Essays
In Hopes and Impediments, Chinua Achebe considers the place of literature and art in our society. This collection of essays spans his writing and lectures over the course of his career, from his groundbreaking and provocative essay on Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness to his assessments of the novelist’s role as a teacher and of the truths of fiction. Achebe reveals the impediments that still stand in the way of open, equal dialogue between Africans and Europeans, between blacks and whites, but also instills us with hope that they will soon be overcome.
Essays/978-0-385-41479-1
A MAN OF THE PEOPLE
Chief Nanga—the powerful but corrupt minister of culture— comes to visit the school where his former student Odili is now a teacher. But Odili soon sees that Nanga is not the man he pretends to be … and eventually decides that he must run for office himself, with disastrous consequences. Perhaps Achebe’s most political novel, A Man of the People is a story of corruption and expectations, deceit and hope. Elegantly fusing the worlds of the traditional village and the modern city, A Man of the People brings together multiple identities of a country leaving behind its colonial past, while trying to make its way into an independent future.
Fiction/978-0-385-08616-5
NO LONGER AT EASE
When Obi Okonkwo—grandson of Okonkwo, the main character of Things Fall Apart—returns to Nigeria from England in the 1950s, his foreign education separates him from his African roots. He’s become a part of a ruling elite whose corruption he finds repugnant. Forced to choose between traditional values and the demands of a changing world, he finds himself trapped between the expectations of his family, his village, and the larger society around him.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-385-47455-9
THINGS FALL APART
Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a “strong man” of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual and society, traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world. The second, as modern as the first is ancient, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo’s world with the arrival of aggressive European missionaries. These perfectly harmonized twin dramas are informed by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-385-47454-2