Things Fall Apart
The Igbo response to a century of European novels about Africa. Achebe's terse, proverb-laden prose tells the story of Okonkwo, a Umuofia village leader whose world is undone by his own pride and by the arrival of Christian missionaries. The title is Yeats; everything else is from inside a culture European fiction had only ever observed from the outside. The most-taught African novel in the world.
In the first half, “chapters drone on about various happenings, disputes, weather events, and rituals,” with “very little in the way of story” until the missionaries arrive. Okonkwo is hard to spend a book with, beating his wives and despising his own father, and he “seems repugnant even to his own people.” The customs around wives, twins and children are bleak enough that historical framing does not fully absorb them. The prose reads to some as “accessible but lacking in vitality,” under-charged for what it carries. The cast of similarly titled names blurs on a first read, which mandatory school assignment does nothing to help.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
