Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart": An Exploration of the Collapse of an African Society

rajiv agrawal: Another gem from Africa. Awesome!

India on Sep 25, 2023

Ben Franklin: To tell the truth, I didn’t expect to like this book much. What I expected was a story about these poor innocent natives who could do no wrong being oppressed by evil white Europeans. What I found was a very balanced treatment of the inevitable culture clash between an advanced society encountering a more primitive one. Neither side comes off particularly bad or good. They’re just humans mucking around doing the best they know how.

United States on Sep 05, 2023

not that slow, but slow enough: I bought this book for my class. I look forward to reading the rest (I've read half) of an amazing story with them.

United States on Sep 03, 2023

Amazon Customer: This is an outstanding book if one wants to know the origins and socio cultural profile of Africa societies before colonialism. Written in exquisite English, the portrayal of the main protagonist will stay with you long after you have read the book.

India on Aug 16, 2023

Not a Critic: I'm used to reading Western literature and I've read widely within that category.

This is very different and made me think.

It's not Dostoyevsky and it's not Tolstoy, nor is it Thackeray or even Louis de bernieres, but it's got something. It has a raw power that drives you to finish it. The same raw power that drives the characters and the storyline. The knowledge that life doesn't stop, until it suddenly does.

A powerful book, with many themes to explore and I recommend it.

United Kingdom on Jul 16, 2023

Molly: The first 3/4 of the book describe customs of a primitive tribe. (If it were a movie, it would be rather boring, I'm afraid.) The the drama starts when white missionaries arrive. The tribe is male-warrior dominated. The leading character hacked off the head of his adopted son, whom he loved, with a machete because the old guys told him to. Twin babies were abandoned crying in the bush as soon as they were born because they were "bad." It was interesting to note that these people had slaves, and it was considered normal. The missionaries saved the twins that were abandoned after they arrived. However they did hang people. I didn't feel like the book presented a point of view and I kept wondering whose side the reader should be on. When I finished it occurred to me that it wasn't really any different than any male-dominated culture, either before or after the missionaries came. There was violence and brutality and subjugation of women. They killed newborn twins, now the violent men shoot little children in their classrooms. The only time the author used the first person pronoun, he said "Our Lord," suggesting that the author had accepted the Christian faith.

United States on May 16, 2023

Cavatica_: With such a short book, something had to be sacrificed, and in this case it was characterization. There are no fully developed individuals in this novel; all are stand-ins for cultural archetypes, and generic. However, Achebe does justify each chapter by giving you something to ponder - such as how, in the tribe, everything is anthropomorphised. A child does not merely get sick and die, they are a spirit that derives some pleasure in tormenting its mother by being born and leaving; a tortoise doesn't just have an interesting pattern on its shell, it got that way by falling from a great height after some birds got their revenge on him, and it broke into pieces, needing to be put back together again. Everything takes on a personality, and the world is seen through a dualist lense.

On the whole, it is a story about how so much of what we derive meaning from, and ultimately suffer for, comes from stories we are told or tell ourselves. We lend such importance to the abstractions of society. Okonkwo is a warrior defeated, not in battle, but in existential crisis.

United Kingdom on Mar 05, 2023

FictionFan: Okonkwo is determined not to be like his drunken, feckless father. Through hard work, he gains an honoured place in his Ibo village as a yam grower with three wives and several children. As we follow what happens to him, we will learn about the ways and traditions of his people, and of how the coming of the white man changed them irrevocably.

The thing is that Achebe’s depiction of those ways and traditions are so appalling that I found myself completely on the side of the colonisers, not a place I either expected or wanted to be! The perpetual beatings of wives and children paled into insignificance when compared to the frequent killings for no reason at the behest of the many seemingly cruel and unjust gods worshipped and feared by the people. Centuries of farming tradition and yet they hadn’t worked out any methods of crop irrigation or protection, leaving them entirely at the mercy of the elements and of those pesky gods. The customs of deciding that some people should be treated as outcasts for no discernible cause and, even worse, of throwing twins out at birth to be left to die in the open made me feel that anything had to have been better than this. Come the...

United Kingdom on Dec 28, 2019

Chi: This is not so much a review of the book as it is a brief commentary of its personal and broader relevance. As a Nigerian-American, I can honestly say that Things Fall Apart is one of the most important books I've ever read. I read it in secondary school in Nigeria 30 years ago and most of it was lost on me because we were forced to read, memorize, and regurgitate its contents to pass exams. We did not have much have a chance to extract and discuss the WEALTH of knowledge that Chinua Achebe unfurls in this book.

Fast-forward to last week in the US when something kept telling me to order another copy (I've lived in a few countries, including Nigeria, and always feel compelled to buy this book anywhere I live but never find time to read it). So, I ordered yet another hard copy and then saw Amazon's Kindle deal while the first copy was in transit in the post. It was a no-brainer -- the Kindle version would solve my traveling woes! Moreover, I devoured it in 3 days! Then I discussed certain passages with my parents whose grandparents would have been Okonkwo's peers and this precipitated priceless family discussions, taking my parents back to their respective...

United States on Jun 17, 2019

Chris Sims: I didn't give this book a chance when it was assigned to me in college but with positive reviews from so many of my classmates, I decided to go back and give it a try...I am glad that I did. It's become an excellent ice-breaker with my Nigerian friends and I think it provides great course material for both highschool and college classes. The cultural barriers and conflicts that we see all the time across the world are studied by following the simple and tragic story of the main character and his village. Unlike others that approach the subject, I think that the author did a great job of staying relatively neutral as I didn't feel like there was any finger pointing or exaggerated accusations.

The book read slower in the beginning but I think it became very exciting towards the end.

Wikipedia's take on the significance of the book was helpful to me when I decided to purchase it on my kindle. Thus, this is what that source has to say:
Things Fall Apart is a milestone in African literature. It has come to be seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English,[2][5] and is read in Nigeria and throughout Africa. Of all of Achebe's works, Things Fall Apart is the one...

United States on Apr 18, 2013