Conversations with Chinua Achebe, and: Understanding Things Fall Apart: Selected Essays and Criticisms, and: Understanding Things Fall Apart: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents (review)

Chinua Achebe is the “father” of the modern African novel, and of African literature in English. His exemplary work as General Editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series and as a critic, teacher, and singular creative voice in African literature attests to this fact. From 1981 to 1998, over 340 new articles and books on Achebe’s writings have been published. Of the scholarly works under review here, a reader might inquire about the necessity of further books on Achebe generally and on Things Fall Apart specifically.

In the 1990s, Michael Echeruo’s Chinua Achebe Revisited (1998), Kole Omotoso’s Achebe or Soyinka? A Reinterpretation and a Study in Contrasts (1995), Romanus Muoneke’s Art, Rebellion and Redemption: A Reading of the Novels of Chinua Achebe (1994), Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kwame Appiah’s edited collection Chinua Achebe: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1994), Christophe Tshikala Kambaji’s Chinua Achebe: A Novelist and Portraitist of His Society (1993), David Carroll’s Chinua Achebe (1990), and Gikandi’s Reading Chinua Achebe (1991) cover the writer and his novel admirably, from a variety of cultural and theoretical perspectives. Indeed, several more specialized studies supplement these general works: Anderson and Arnoldi’s Art in Achebe: Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God (1978), Bernth Lindfors’s Approaches to Teaching Things Fall Apart (1991), and Easthope’s Students’ Guide to Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1999). The publication of Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s biography of Achebe in 1997 is cause for celebration, but it also marks the time for reflection and assessment on this remarkable literary critical phenomena.

In his introduction to Conversations with Chinua Achebe, Bernth Lindfors notes the success of Things Fall Apart: over 8 million copies sold—in various formats, editions, and markets—over the last 41 years (ix). In the chronology, Achebe’s impact and reputation is further reinforced by the 26 honorary doctoral degrees, from England, Scotland, Nigeria, and the United States. Achebe, then, deserves the considerable attention he has received. So what does Conversations add?

The volume opens with an introduction, a chronology of Achebe’s life, followed by 21 conversations, and is concluded with an index (primarily surnames and organizations). The earliest interview, in this chronologically arranged work, is Lewis Nkosi’s piece from 1962. More “fresh” for those in institutions without research libraries are Tony Hall’s 1967 piece from The Sunday Nation (Nairobi), Ernest and Pat Emenyonu’s “Achebe: Accountable to Our Society” (reprinted from Africa Report 1972), Onuora Ossie Enekwe’s 1976 interview for Okike, and Biodun Jeyifo’s Nigeria Magazine Press volume of 1983. Lindfors’s knowledge of the area is apparent in such “finds” as the interview in the appendix of B.V. Harajagannadh’s unpublished PhD dissertation, India 1985. Gordon Lewis’s 1995 interview concludes this volume of conversations spanning 33 years as a novelist and verbal theorist of his art.

The content of the Lindfors volume covers all aspects of Achebe’s life, but rightly concentrates on those events that illuminate his artistic practices. Lindfors breaks these into general statements, the autobiographical (an odd division given the nature of Achebe’s art and its connection to his people), “On Igbo Life and Culture,” “On Language and Style,” “On Other Literatures, Other Literary Forms,” “On Writing and Being a Writer,” and “Works.” All of the interviews are competently executed; each reveals useful information about the literary aspects of Achebe’s life. If the volume has a deficiency, it is that most...