Novel · A way to begin
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe · 1958
Synopsis
Okonkwo has made a name for himself in Umuofia through wrestling and hard work, ashamed of a father who was a flute player and buried in debt. He raises his family harshly, kills with his own hand a boy entrusted to the village, against the advice of the elders, then kills a man by accident during a funeral and has to go into exile for seven years at his mother's home. When he returns, a church has been built, a court judges in place of the elders, and his eldest son has gone over to the other side.
Context
The novel was written at twenty-eight by an employee of Nigerian radio who was reacting to the way the English told the story of Africa: he had read Joyce Cary and judged that nothing in it resembled what he knew. It was published in London by Heinemann. The first French translation waited eight years, whereas the German had taken only one; it was out of print in France by 2006, and a second translation appeared in 2013, the year of the author's death.
Who it is for
Short, limpid, without any difficulty, often the first African novel one reads. The last page overturns the whole book.
Prizes and reception
More than twenty million copies sold, translated into about fifty languages; it opens Heinemann's African Writers Series in 1962.