Classic Literature

There is a habit of speaking about Chinua Achebe as though he were a statue, the man who wrote the one African novel everyone is assigned in school. The fuller figure is stranger and larger: the novelist across three generations, the critic who took on the Western canon, the editor who published a whole tradition into being.

Some books are monuments; a few are doorways. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is the door through which the whole tradition of modern African literature is entered, and it refuses every easy sympathy it seems to invite. A reckoning with a culture worth grieving and a man who helped author his own fall.