About a half-century ago, a shy young Nigerian man, who had grown up reading Dickens and "Pilgrim's Progress," put his handwritten novel in the mail to a typing service in London. The manuscript sat untouched for months, until a colleague rescued it during a visit to Britain. These pages, after several rejections, later found their way to a sympathetic publisher.
The book eventually released, "Things Fall Apart," became a critical hit in Britain as well as the first African novel to break through to the English-speaking world. Not only did it sell -- nearly 10 million copies, in 50 languages -- this slim, understated volume became the one African novel to break, unambiguously, into the often impenetrable Western canon. The book continues to live: High school kids and college students read it for class, while African novelists read it to pursue its ideas and themes.
To literary scholar John Marx of UC Davis, it's "the first novel of the African literary canon, to be sure, but also a key text in the body of writing one needs to know to be literate. I'd say that's the case not only in the English-speaking world but just about everywhere."
"Things Fall Apart," set in a traditional, folkloric Igbo village that is eventually dismantled by white missionaries, is also the unusual classic whose status has grown since its canonization.
Over the next few weeks the novel's legacy is being celebrated -- including an event at New York's Town Hall on Tuesday initiated by the publisher Vintage and produced by the PEN American Center, with appearances by Toni Morrison, Ha Jin, Colum McCann, members of the Alvin Ailey dance troupe and Chinua Achebe himself. The tribute is expected to fill most of Town Hall's more than 1,500 seats.
Chris Abani, the Los Angeles-based Nigerian writer who's read the novel a dozen times since discovering it at age 10, calls the book inescapable. The only people he knows to come out against it are young African novelists announcing themselves as iconoclasts.
"And then six or seven years later, they think about the debt that they owe that book," he said. "You're either working against it or within it; you're rejecting it or you're accepting it. But the conversation has to include it."
Showing the way
Though the book is written as a fable or oral story that might be told over a village feast, it's a deeply literary book as well: Its title comes from W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming," a poem that echoes through the novel.
