Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a classic, must-read, perspective-altering book. Achebe wrote it over fifty years ago and it’s as provocative today as it was then.
In February, Achebe latest work will arrive in South Africa: The Education of a British-Protected Child, a “collection of old and recent essays that piece together the arc of his literary life”.
The new book has already attracted notice in many parts of the world; here’s a great summarizing story from Reuters:
Chinua Achebe, the grandfather of modern African literature, first began telling stories as a means to reaching the truth. Fiction, he knew, could sometimes strike deeper than real life.
More than 50 years ago Achebe wrote “Things Fall Apart,” a novel about an African tribe's fatal brush with British colonialism in the 1800s that told the story of colonialism for the first time from an African perspective.
Written in English, “Things Fall Apart” told a world audience about the upheaval that Africa had endured. It was translated into 50 languages and sold more than 8 million copies worldwide.
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October 7th, 2009 @13:47 #
Am rushing out to get this immediately.
The quote about Achebe by Madiba on the cover (I’m sure there’s a technical term for when they put quotes on the cover but I don’t know what it is), rings out in my head like a reminder-bell: “The writer in whose company the prison walls fell down”. I need to read Things Fall Apart again. Before-reading-Things-Fall-Apart and After-reading-Things-Fall-Apart seem to be distinct eras in the human development of everyone who has read Things Fall Apart. There are other books which do it too of course, but that one seems to be a biggie.
But: if it has sold eight and a half million copies which is roughly one copy for everyone living in Gauteng presently, and we use pseudo-maths plus a preposterous thumb suck to allow us to optimistically assume that it has been read by, say, four hundred million people alive today; that still leaves more than six and a half billion (Look, I am not a numbers person and should never be allowed anywhere near this stuff. I know. Anyone else want to give this sum a try?) who have not read Things Fall Apart. Or not had it read to them or not listened to it on a tape or anything. Alive today are six and a half billion people WHO HAVE NOT READ IT. This is a big problem. I get emotional.
October 7th, 2009 @15:38 #
I'm with AR here. But maybe not quite so emotional.