No Longer at Ease - Supernormal Reads

No cover — Chinua Achebe: No Longer at Ease (Fawcett)

English language

Published by Fawcett.

ISBN:: 978-0-449-30758-8

(1 review)

A novel of a Western educated Nigerian struggling to bridge the chasm between his education and his tribal upbringing and culture. On his return to Nigeria he gains a position with the Scholarship Board and is immediately offered bribes by people trying to get a scholarship. Scandalised, he initially refuses but after getting into financial difficulties and losing his faith in his countrymen’s ability to modernise after his family forbids him to marry the woman he loves due to a tribal taboo, he eventually succumbs to the temptation and is caught in a government ‘sting’.

24 editions

ralentina reviewed No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe

Quite mindblowing

5 stars

I don't know why I put off for reading this book for so long, having read and loved. Things Fall Apart. Though the two stand independently, I wish I remembered more details about the first book, to tie the pieces together. At any rate, I was not disappointed. Though a sense of doomness runs through it, the book reads itself, so to speak. The writing is engaging and elegant, which this is especially remarkable given the weight of the themes handled: family and tradition vs individual choice, one's moral duty in a corrupted structure, colonialism and its legacy, the alienation of the protagonist, caught in between two systems of thought...all discussed with such sensitivity and complexity. Really recommended.