Happy Holidays, everyone.  To keep with the pattern I set for myself, I should be telling you about a movie today, but this month we have a special occasion.  When  you go to college and study literature, you do a lot of reading.  Most of it is pretty rough.  You end up speed reading a lot of books that should be savored, and you read a lot of books that just aren’t that great.  People who study literature will read these bad books because they are culturally important.  However, once in a while you get a book that is both culturally important and a really good read.  These are golden moments that remind you why literature is a worthwhile experience.

Earlier this month, Chinua Achebe turned 79.  His novel Things Fall Apart is one of those stories that is at once obviously relevant and a joy to read.  It’s a little over two hundred pages long and deeply worth your time.  The narrative is told from a third-person perspective, but it uses limpid, effortless prose to follow Okonkwo, a hero who could have been pulled from any Greek tragedy.

Okonkwo is a wrestling champion and village leader in Nigeria.  His feats of strength have afforded him high social status and three beautiful wives.  The story follows his life, and to a lesser extent his family’s lives, as missionaries from Britain set up shop and interact with Okonkwo’s village.

Okonkwo isn’t just a hero, though.  He isn’t just the main character or a fighter.  Okonkwo is a definition.  He fears becoming lazy and weak like his father, so he builds himself up as a male archetype: strong, patriarchal, authoritative, stalwart, viril.  He’s a fixed point, demonstrating to the world what men ought to be without bothering to understand what men can be.  The first missionary he encounters is a man named Brown.  Brown seems as interested in learning about the Igbo, Okonkwo’s ethnic group, as he is in converting them.  Brown does not last through the book, though.  When he retires, a man named Smith takes his place and introduces  a much less open approach to missionary work.  Smith is out for proselytes.  He is as rigidly Christian as Okonkwo is rigidly Not-Christian.  As you can imagine, sparks fly.

Now, the whole book isn’t about Okonkwo and British people.  The author spends a lot of time describing rituals and customs.  He goes into detail about the strife of a mother who gives birth to twins.  He describes the joy of a village when locusts swarm up from over the horizon.  If at this point you’re confused that anyone should celebrate a cloud of pests, then you’ve discovered why this novel was written.  What we have been raised to view as a pestilence, the people of Okonkwo’s village view as a surprise feast.  They prepare the locusts and eat them as an easy source of protein.  Whatever you’re feeling right now, be it revulsion at the idea of anyone crunching down on a giant grasshopper or admiration at the resourcefulness of an intriguing people, is the other reason Achebe wrote this novel.

All through the book, the greatest flaw a character can have (the worst hamartia leading to paripeteia, as the aforementioned scholars say) is cultural insularity.  If a character cannot openly interact with another person, to learn about their culture and habits, without attempting to overpower or convert them, he won’t do well in this novel.  The title, Things Fall Apart, is taken from a poem by Yeats called “The Second Coming.”  As you can tell by the title, the poem is about the end of the world (well, sort of).  The gist of it all is that if you can’t get along with others, your Things will Fall Apart.  You will become irrelevant.  You won’t do well.

That’s the really important part.  This book was written in English, while the author is from Nigeria and speaks Igbo.  Can you guess why it was written in English?  Why would a Nigerian write a book about cultural understanding and interaction in English?  Because it was written for us!  And the coolest part is that it doesn’t get preachy about it’s message.  If you like reading about world cultures, or if you were ever pissed off by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, you will probably enjoy this book.  I think everyone should read it.  Although, as you can probably tell, I’m a little biased.