Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Achebe, Chinua (Vol. 26) - John Povey

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JOHN POVEY

Chinua Achebe is very clearly the best novelist in that group of writers who at Ibadan in the fifties contrived the birth of West African literature in English. He may lack the easy grace and wit of that urbane dramatist Wole Soyinka, yet his work has a structural strength and architectural coherence unmatched by other novelists…. So close are many African novelists to the events they record that there is none of that artistic distance which is the basis for the writer's art. Plots mirror the autobiographical information proffered in the fly-leaf of the book's dust-jacket and this causes the balance of events to be seen only through the single self-satisfied vision of the protagonist, and the end, unless it has the shock of unexpected melodrama, can be a mere finish, for the novel has failed to develop any impetus more structural than that of the author's own life. None of these criticisms can be levelled at Achebe. The mere fact that he is one of the...

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1. Introduction
2. The Times Literary Supplement
3. Phoebe-Lou Adams
4. John Coleman
5. Robert C. Healey
6. Time
7. Phoebe-Lou Adams
8. Ronald Christ
9. Charles Miller
10. ROBERT McDOWELL
11. Kate Turkington
12. Adrian A. Roscoe
13. Bruce King
14. John Povey
15. The New Yorker
16. Ifeanyi A. Menkiti
17. The New York Times Book Review
18. Joseph Bruchac
19. Francis M. Sibley
20. G. D. Killam
21. Jonathan Peters
22. Bruce King
23. Copyright

1. Chinua Achebe