• THINGS FALL APART
• by Chinua Achebe
• [rated by PBS readers as #82]
• 209 pages

I’m not sure why but this book keeps reminding me of The Good Earth. Well, I am sure why, now that I think of it.

Both are unsentimental accounts of life in a completely unknown place to most of the readers. Both are sparsely told but with the perfect detailed storytelling to allow yourself to be in the story.

Both have central characters that you can’t really like. You can occasionally feel for them but in no sense are they lovable.

And then – the dates. The dates they were written are a huge part of why they are so brave. Pearl S. Buck wrote the Good Earth in the 30’s, I think. And Things Fall Apart was written in the year of my birth, 1959. This makes them outrageously ahead of their time.

It also, sadly, adds a lot to my Breathless analogy. By the time I saw Goddard’s Breathless during college, I knew that it was too far away from when it had been made for me to get it. I grasped its originality but I had also seen 30 years worth of knock offs from it’s originality – so much so that I could never get that “my head was blown off” experience that you could only have gotten in the 60s when it came out.

I only started Things Fall Apart and I’m already about half way through. It is sort of a fable, explaining the life of this central character, Okonkwe, his wives, his kids, his excessive beatings given to all of them when he was upset (see what I mean? lovable!)…

It’s possible that this story will turn and become very deep. If not, it will be Breathless. I will end up admiring it but not having it swing me sideways. Time and another hundred pages will tell!

DONE. Well, it got deeper, as the Christians came and the cultures crashed up against each other. I’m not entirely sure that it felt congruent with the rest of the book’s direction, but I guess so.

The last third of the book felt like an enormous painting of life in this part of Nigeria. Every detail mentioned but in the end, life was life.

In the end, I still compare it to The Good Earth but then it becomes comparable to Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut. I know no one but me will ever compare these two books except me.

And it is for one reason. They are both remarkable in their skills of writing, description and uniqueness. But then, when you see that they were written in 1959, the year I was born!, they become great a bit more than is contained within.

I won’t know enough to get a chronology but I imagine that Achebe paved the way for thousands of writers inspired by his no nonsense accounting of a community’s sea change. And in that, I’m sure his efforts move into the priceless realm.