Things Fall Into Place for Chinua Achebe

Bob Thompson in The Washington Post (via bookforum):

Chinua Achebe has been asked to consider a simple thought experiment:

Suppose someone had told him, 50 years ago, that his first novel soon would be known all over the world? That "Things Fall Apart," published in 1958, would go on to sell around 11 million copies in something like 45 languages? That at the dawn of the 21st century, his own daughter would be teaching it to American college students?

What would he have said?

"I don't think there was anybody who would have thought that up," he replies. "If anyone did, I would say they were out of their mind."

At this, the writer who changed the way the world looked at Africa throws back his head and laughs.

Achebe is sitting in the living room of his modest, wheelchair-friendly house on the campus of Bard College. Silver-haired and frail at 77, 18 years removed from the Nigerian car accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down, he speaks in a voice so quiet that a tape recorder at times has trouble picking it up.

But his laugh -- infectious and accompanied by a wide grin -- comes through every time.

Comments

[rhbee]

I first read this novel in the late 1960's. I was in my second year of teaching. The ideas that crowded into my mind have stayed there and percolate from time to time into poetry I write and essays, too. I think actually quite often of the phrase as I travel. Things do fall apart and as I learned then they come together again. I am glad you thought to commemorate this book. It's time I read it again.

[Esteban Agosto Reid]

Great book!To have been published in forty five languages is a major accomplishment.I read it in college,it was extremely instructive,but I need to revisit it.Indeed,things do fall(deconstruct) apart and at times do come (reconstruct) together again,speaking experientially,of course.