Post-Colonial Fiction recommended by Librarian Sarah Houghton
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart.
Division ensues when missionaries arrive at Umuofia and other nearby villages. Christ says that He brings division, and this prophecy is fulfilled when one of Okonkwo's sons leaves home to embrace Christianity. On a larger scale, people in the village are divided amongst themselves--the Christians on one side and those who follow the traditional beliefs on the other. This division, like all others, leads to inevitable despair.
Coetzee, JM. Disgrace. Disgrace investigates the psyche of the post-Apartheid South Africa. When the scandal of a professor's affair with a student breaks, the professor (Lurie) has the chance to save his career, but chooses not to do so. His failure to communicate results in a self-imposed state of disgrace.
Desai, Anita. Baumgartner's Bombay.
A German native, Harry Baumgartner escapes to Calcutta as a boy after his family suffers the rise of Hitler and the simultaneous fall of the Baumgartner fine-furniture business, as well as the decimation of their Jewish heritage.
Emecheta, Buchi. Joys of Motherhood.
This story of a young mother's struggles in 1950s Lagos is a powerful commentary on polygamy, patriarchy, and women's changing roles in urban Nigeria. The bride price is paid and a young Nigerian girl is sent off to Lagos to a man she has never met. She struggles through the years to bear, feed, and clothe their children.
Gordimer, Nadine. The Pickup.
To Julie Summer, rebellious daughter of a rich white investment banker, the black mechanic she meets at a garage is initially merely an interesting person to add to her circle of bohemian friends. But as their relationship swiftly escalates, Julie comes to understand her lover's perilous tightrope attempts to find a country that will shelter him.
Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place.
Kincaid examines the geography and history of Antigua, where she was raised. We first see the island through the eyes of the typical North American tourist, who aims to exchange his or her own "everydayness" for that of someone without the same privilege. But rather than interpret Antiguan experience for outsiders, Kincaid lays bare the limits of her own understanding. She asks us to grasp the crime of empire in a new way, stressing that it can be understood only from a post-colonial point of view: surveying 20 years of a corrupt ``free'' government, she finds the inheritance of colonialism to be a commercial and governmental enterprise that serves individual interests. Antiguans, she effectively demonstrates, are ordinary people saddled with an unthinkable but unbreachable past.
Naipaul, VS. A Bend in the River.
V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.
Narayan, RK. The Guide.
Raju's first stop after his release from prison is the barber shop. Then he decides to take refuge in an abandoned temple. Raju used to be India's most corrupt tourist guide--but now a peasant mistakes him for a holy man. Gradually, almost grudgingly, Raju begins to play the part. He succeeds so well that God himself intervenes to put Raju's new holiness to the test.
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things.
With sensuous prose, a dreamlike style infused with breathtakingly beautiful images and keen insight into human nature, Roy's novel charts fresh territory in the genre of magical, prismatic literature. Set in Kerala, India, during the late 1960s when Communism rattled the age-old caste system, the story begins with the funeral of young Sophie Mol, the cousin of the novel's protagonists, Rahel, and her fraternal twin brother, Estha.
Rushdie, Salman. Satanic Verses.
Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two men--an Indian movie star and a an expatriate--plummet from the sky. Washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, they proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations. Satanic Verses is the book that earned Rushdie a fatwa, or religiously-fueled multi-million dollar reward for the author's assassination, from Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini.
