While I was reading this book, I couldn't help but feel myself transferred back to my high school days... reading a book that I had little invested interest in but felt an obligation to finish. This book definitely has the feeling of the kind of book a school would choose to give their students a proper introduction to other cultures. (If you don't read about other cultures you won't be cultured enough for us to let you graduate!)

And this book is heavy with the feeling that it is trying to inform you about the wide world of peoples out there that have suffered in unimaginable ways. Now, I have no problem with a book that is written with that purpose, I have enjoyed many books like that, (Kaffir Boy, for instance). The problem I had with this book and its message, was that it portrayed it badly, in many ways.

The first thing that really bothered me was the main character, Okonkwo. If you're going to write a book where you're trying to emphasize the suffering a character is going through, you would think you'd write him as a character someone could empathize with. I'm sorry, but I can't empathize with a character who beats his wife and children, and blames it on father issues. Secondly, the book was quite honestly... boring. A sizable chunk of the novel is spent talking about yams, farming yams, and all the bad things that have happened to the yams and the yam farms. More detail is put into yams than character development. I understand Achebe must be trying to show a piece of the culture he grew up with... but it was honestly just boring. And I know its possible to make farming sound interesting in books... Achebe didn't do that.
But it wasn't just the farming in the book that was boring – quite frankly not a lot of interesting things happen in this book. There are a few intriguing scenes but they are so minor, and lacking in conclusion, that they aren't enough to make up for the scenes that are dull.

The last thing that I had a big problem with was the cookie-cutter stereotypes of the characters. It is a story about how white colonizers negatively affected an African tribe. This is not a type of story I have a problem with. What I did have a problem with was how the white and African characters pretty much followed a very predictable scenario – the Christian missionaries come in and try to preach to the tribespeople; The tribespeople respond by fighting, killing missionaries, and destroying churches. I find this ironic because I believe I read somewhere, that as a young man, Achebe was angry at stories of Africa depicting "savage Africans." (Such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.) Is he making a stab at that literature through this book? Or maybe this really was a situation he encountered in his youth?? I'm sure a lot of clashes really did happen between white colonizers/missionaries and the tribespeople of Africa. But the way it was in this book was just so predictable I could almost tell you what would happen on the next page. And it surprised me that someone who seems to have experienced this kind of situation firsthand wrote it in such a seemingly generic, predictable manner.
And tying this in with the end, when Okonkwo kills himself because he sees the irreparable damage the Christians have done to his tribe's culture... I didn't even feel bad for him. Sorry your culture's ruined...... but you beat your wives/children constantly. So.... really... I'm not sorry.

This is a really hard book to give a bad review, too. It's easy to think that someone must be racist because of giving this book a bad review... but there are so many parts of this book that I personally think are dangerously on the edge of being racist, and work to prolong stereotypes. And to add on top of that problem – it has bad characters and is generally just boring. Perhaps, in the end, I am thinking about this book in too simple of terms, that I'm under-analyzing it. Maybe it's the sort of book where you have to look even deeper than you might think to try and get the "true message" out of it. Maybe. But then maybe there are a million other books out there that I could be better spending my time on. ( )

A haunting parable. The final chapter of this book still stings my western heart with every reading. Others have written eloquently on this work - and some reviews on here posit an alternative viewpoint on the apparently uppity and unreasonable, if not downright ungrateful aims of postcolonialist literature - so you can make up your own mind on that. But gosh I think this was an important novel 60 years ago, and it remains so. A challenge to its western readership, from the use of untranslated words to its matter-of-fact, quasi-Dickensian ironic descriptions of the local culture as seen through the protagonist, and sometimes his children - already questioning their own culture, as we all do.

A complex portrayal of colonialism that twists the knife very well indeed. ( )

Although the main theme of this novel is the colonialization of Africa by Great Britain in the late 19th century, it also exposes the folly of hubris, particularly of its protagonist, Okonkwo. The first part of the story centers on Okonkwo's life in his agriculture-centric society, Umuofia, and its kinship ties, superstitions, and rituals. Okonkwo has some reason to be proud: he pulled himself up by the bootstraps, so to speak, not having the same advantages as his Igbo clansmen because his father was considered lazy and contemptible, and he suffered an outcast's death. Okonkwo fear of failure haunts him throughout, and he becomes hard man with an inflexible will and a fiery temper that he blames on his personal god because of the shame his father brought to the family. Although he achieves great success in his fatherland, Okonkwo is ultimately banished for seven years and seeks shelter in his motherland, Mbanta, where he again prospers but still longs to return to his fatherland. Upon his return to Umuofia, he finds much has changed, largely as the result of the British missionaries and administrators who are trying to "civilize" the non-Christians. Achebe explores the impact of colonialism on different aspects of village life and the different categories of villagers. It was refreshing to see colonialism portrayed through the eyes of the colonized, not of the colonizers, as in Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. To be, the real reason things fell apart was a failure of communication between the Western interlopers and the natives. ( )

An engaging story about an African man, his family and tribe. Achebe depicts the brutality of the animistic, pagan patriarchal, honour-shame culture before colonisation. When the colonisers arrive they bring their own form of brutalitiy coloaked beneath British law and order:

It is a story of contrasts: strong vs weak, masculine vs feminine, fortune vs failure, pagan animism vs Christianity, African tribal culture vs Western colonisation.

Achebe depicts the first missionary to the tribe in contradistiction to the colonisers. The Christianity that arrives is bold yet gentle, confident yet wiling to suffer. In contrast to the darkness of pagan animism, the missionaries bring freedom from the fear of evils spirits, curses and capricious gods. They welcome outcasts and adopt twin babies who have been left to die in the jungle. They speak of a Father God full of love in a culture where fathers were harsh and unyielding. The missionaries weren’t perfect (especially the second who arrives later in Achebe’s story), but Achebe makes the point that the Christianity the missionaries brought enriched the lives of the Africans.

The final sentance in the novel reveals what Achebe thinks his work is about:

"The Commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner should never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from a tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger."

I found this review helpful: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/830031498 ( )

Things Fall Apart is fascinating as it depicts what it felt like living in a clan in the SE part of Nigeria on the cusp of British colonization during the late 19th century. Written from the point of view of of someone living then and there, it personalizes that part of the world in a way I hadn't before experienced in literature.
The plot follows the story of Okonkwo, a man who worked to rescue his family name from his father’s disgraceful failure, becomes successful in his Igbo Chinua Achebe details the clan’s parameters of rules, etiquette, beliefs and hierarchies and shows via internal monologues the difficulty of questioning the rules and going against the flow.
Okonkwo holds fast to his deeply held machismo ideal and derides any man who acts womanish, a trait he sees in his own son. He prides himself on his successes, and plans to become a great leader but he himself breaks a rule that changes the course of his life. Eventually the clan – who had never seen or dealt with white people – are confronted with the influx of Christian missionaries and British political envoys. The intercultural clash brought in by the colonists is psychologically and physically brutal.
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