Our bookclub discussion on Tuesday night centred around 'Things Fall Apart', by Chinua Achebe, one of the first African novels written in English. I know, I know, I should have read it by now. But I hadn't. I studied 'English Literature' after all and we all know what happens when you study Eng. Lit. Nobody ever missed 'Heart of Darkness' off the syllabus, did they? Not that it's any excuse. I've had 17 years since then to see the light. I think my friend, S, a white South African, felt the same. The book was required reading every second year when she was at Roedean in Sth Africa. Her husband got to read it. She was in the wrong year and didn't. And ever since then it had lingered on her shelf.
The novel centres around the tragic hero Okonkwo, a great tribesman whose fierce resistance to European colonisation is not enough to prevent his tragedy. Achebe was born in 1930 in Ogidi, an Igbo village near the Niger. In his twenties, whilst studying medicine, he wrote the novel in rebellion against the work of Conrad, Joyce Cary, Rider Haggard and the like where his own people were seen as the tamed savage. In Achebe's novel, we see Africa from its own perspective, the novelist gives his people a voice. He finds a way of representing the language and world of one society in the language of a very different one.
For me and for most new readers, there's no doubt that reading this novel is like entering another world. It's an altogether different form, a different experience. The language is deceptively simple, yet it conjures up the world of the Igbo tribes before colonisation in a way that is neither sentimental nor simplistic. The horrors of that society are made plain, indeed Achebe writes that he purposefully showed the horrors. Yet the world has its own coherent structure, a structure that the coming of the white man collapsed.
As I read, I was moved, most of all, by the truth of the storytelling. Fiction allows us to enter new worlds in a way that non-fiction cannot always manage and as a reader veering towards non-fiction, I was grateful to be reminded why fiction is important, what it can achieve at its height.
It was refreshing to be at book club. People listened intently to others. There was a sense of wonder about this novel, a desire to share reactions and information. It was an interesting group of people to be among. C, who worked in Zimbabwe for VSO before Mugabe's rule was on her fourth reading of the novel. She said each reading deepened the pleasure, it was a novel that repaid re-reading. She particulary noticed the proverbs this time around and the landscape descriptions that earlier had escaped her notice.
What I like about our book group is that it involves no literary pretension. It's a group of women (and one man) who met in a 'baby music' group, who came together as parents in the first place. Now most of the children are at school and we're no longer talking about tambourines. I'm the token writer but I'm generally awed by what others have to say. But not a hint of showing-off or ego. Just sharing our reactions, making sense of the books. And yes, having a take-away and a bottle of wine and a gossip.
Books like 'Things Fall Apart' are so huge, so significant, that I feel rather foolish gossiping about it here. I'd like to write more but the children are waiting for their baths and my husband is running out of patience (those who know him will laugh at that comment). So perhaps I'll often write in bursts, in an inadequate, short-hand way. But such gossip is the stuff of life. As are baths and children.
Yes, enjoy it while you can, my children get irate if they get a mention on the blog, as they are old enough to read both my blog and my books!
I'm really glad one of my children has her own book group now, a group of young science graduates who all probably should have done lit at some stage but have been channelled into the so-called 'heavy' stuff. And they love to discuss what they read ... it's terrific. I hope they keep it up, they work so darn hard.
Posted by: genevieve | June 18, 2005 at 03:26 PM