No Longer at Ease (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Obi sinks deeper into financial trouble partly due to poor planning on his end, in part due to the need to repay his loan to the UPU and to pay for his siblings' education, and in part due to the cost of the illegal abortion.

Everyone loves to joke about Nigerian scams and the daily corruption spread over third world countries. But why did this happen? This question is beautifully answered in No Longer at Ease. He sat and mused, listening to the words of the traders' songs and wondering why Clara said he could not tell people about her yet. After all, she did talk about wanting to marry him. The driver was pulled over by policemen and Obi tried to meddle, which made the driver have to pay a higher bribe to the officers. The driver refused to talk to Obi after that. Short fiction: “Dead Men’s Path,” 1953; The Sacrificial Egg, and Other Stories, 1962; Girls at War, and Other Stories, 1972.Obi spent most of his time with Clara and his friends, such as the louche Christopher, Joseph, and a high-ranking Nigerian politician, the Hon. Sam Okoli. He found himself in a great deal of money trouble, as he continually received bills and could not find a way to pay for them. Once Clara gave him a mysterious fifty pounds to help him out, but he decided not to use it and it was accidentally stolen from his car. As a young man, the Umuofia Progressive Union awarded him a scholarship to study in England. They hoped he would be a lawyer but he chose to study English instead. Before he left everyone gave him a party and the village pastor warned him to keep to his studies and stay out of trouble.

An even more predominant feature of the five novels is their style. Achebe makes the necessary compromise and writes in English, a foreign tongue, but manipulates it to capture the flavor of the native Igbo expression. He does this through dialect, idiom, and figurative language as well as through proverbs that reflect traditional Igbo wisdom, comment ironically on the inadequacies of the characters, and state the central themes. I understand the story and the main message, which is how Nigeria was colonized and therefore contaminated by the Brits from the point of view of the administration and how clean or honest everything is done.He first went to Lagos on his way over to England, where he spent time with Joseph Okeke, a clerk in the survey department and a fellow countryman. Joseph met Obi when he arrived and talked on and on about dancing and girls and the city. The second day Obi took a walk because Joseph had a girl at his place; the girl was scintillating but left a bad taste in his mouth. The main character studied in England thanks to a scholarship that was paid from Nigeria. He was an impeccable person, who was not possible to bribe or do anything dishonest with him. However, once he ran out of money, his vision of things slowly changed due to thing I'm not going to mention to not spoil anything, but at the end the message intends that money is a super powerful weapon which we all need at least once in our lives. Some people more than others, but we need it. In a nutshell "Money doesn't mean happiness, but gosh it helps!". The novel's protagonist, Obi Okonkwo, is a young man who has returned to Nigeria after having studied in England. The fact that he went to England to study and has returned puts him in a peculiar position, one in which he will have to face the issues of a man torn between his own country and what he has learned in the hands of those who have colonized his country (the English). The novel follows his idealistic beginnings to his unfortunate end, an end in which he is put on trial for taking a bribe.

Achebe won several awards over the course of his writing career, including the Man Booker International Prize (2007) and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2010). Additionally, he received honorary degrees from more than 30 universities around the world. Death There is also the irony of Obi's name, which means "the mind is at last at rest." It is supposed to mean that his father's mind is at rest because he was born a boy after so many girls; however, when juxtaposed against the title of the novel it becomes the greatest irony of the novel because Obi is, of course, never, himself, "at rest." Climax There are two climaxes in the novel. The first is when Obi finds himself in mental turmoil right at the point where he has lost Clara and his mother had died and the second is when he is arrested for having taken a bribe. Isaac Okonkwo, Obi’s father at first appears hard-nosed, however, it becomes evident that his decision to become a devoted Christian, against the will of his father, shows his willingness to be true to himself, such as his son is trying to do. His religious devotion is sometimes extreme as he insists his wife and children adhere to his strict rituals. Ironically, his zealousness prevents him from helping his son and they both miss the point of his being the most appropriate person to do so. Obi secures admission to study law in London, not a mean achievement for he is the first in his village Umuofia to achieve this. However, in Nigeria where money is meager, the means to fulfill this dream appear thin. This is when the villagers who stand by each-other in strong kinship come to the aid of Obi and tax themselves heavily to collect money for his education.He misses Nigeria and is in fact nostalgic for her when he is away. He understands what he must do for his country and that she is important; however, his return is different from memory. Memory is, in many ways, shattered when he revisits Lagos and his old home of Umuofia. Furthermore, by the end he finds himself uneasy with his lot in life: he is broke, he has lost Clara and his mother and has given in to taking bribes. Finally he feels guilt for this but it is too late. Tone The tone of Achebe throughout the novel is that of social and political criticism. Though the main character, Obi, may seem confused and often even indifferent, Achebe always knows what he is doing—he is writing a novel about what is going on in Nigeria and in much of Africa, for that matter, during the end of the 1950s. While his personal life is falling off the cliff, financially Obi is suffering the worst onslaught of debt and tax. Living off his 70 pound salary, he finds that most of it goes to educate his younger brother and maintaining his official car and residence. Over and above that he has to start repaying his education loan to the villagers – 20 pounds each month. Faced with the grim financial situation Obi hopes to get a 4 month extension on the loan from the Union, but his request meets with the mumbling disapproval of villagers who don’t understand how a man who earns 70 pounds can not repay his loan. There are many reasons why I liked No Longer at Ease best. First and foremost, the writing has improved so much. I have underlined so many beautiful passages and am overall just shooketh by the beauty of the writing style. On top of that, it featured themes that were more interesting to me. At the centre of the story stands the clash of past versus present, old versus new. Obi’s generation is trying to emancipate themselves from the legacy and burden of their forefathers. I really enjoyed how fresh and intriguing this novel with its new set of (more) progressive ideas was.

Chris, too, begins to see a special power in Beatrice during the weeks of crisis. She becomes for him a priestess of sexual and spiritual resources who could, as a prophetess, tell the future. Indeed, it is Beatrice (a literary allusion to Dante’s Beatrice, only one of several whimsical allusions in the novel) who warns Chris and Ikem that they must mend their relationship, that tragedy is in store not only for them but also for Sam. They do not take her seriously enough, however, as they soon discover. Achebe, however, does not allow the elevation of Beatrice into the traditional Igbo role of half woman, half spirit (the Chielo of Things Fall Apart, as Beatrice herself notes), to be the work of the characters alone. In chapter 8, Achebe himself, as omniscient narrator, recounts the Igbo legend of the sun-god who sent his daughter to earth as a harbinger of peace. This legend suggests that henceforth women must stand as mediators between men and their desires, but this too is not Achebe’s final word on the subject. As Ikem says in his confession to Beatrice in chapter 7, “All certitude must now be suspect.” Although Obi begins his life in Nigeria in an honest way, events do not go as he has planned. First, Clara tells him that she cannot marry him because she is an osu, an outcast. Obi decides to ignore this and go against what most of his fellow countrymen believe to be a major transgression of custom, and he decides he will marry her anyway. Still, his economic hardship worsens, given that he has to send money home and that he is in debt. Obi then receives a letter from his father telling him that he must go home. When he arrives at home he sees that his mother is very ill. And, his parents tell him he must not marry Clara because she is an osu. In fact, Obi's dying mother gives him an ultimatum: she tells him that if he insists on marrying Clara, he must wait until she is dead because if he marries Clara while she is alive, she will kill herself. Furthermore, Achebe depicts a family continuity between Ogbuefi Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart and his grandson Obi Okonkwo in No Longer at Ease. Both men are confrontational, speak their minds, and have some self-destructive tendencies. However, this aggressive streak manifests itself in different ways. Where his grandfather was a man of action and violence, Obi is a man of words and thoughts to the exclusion of action. [1] The story portrays the theme of corruption. Asking these and many more such difficult to answer questions is Chinua Achebe in his book – No Longer At Ease.The brother of a young woman applying for a scholarship comes to his office with a bribe - about half of Obi’s monthly salary. He rejects the bribe. Now the attractive young woman appears at his house, offering herself to him. He rejects her advances but realizes that all he is doing is condemning her to go offer herself down the line to the scholarship committee members. (He has a discussion with his male friend who insists that accepting sex is not ‘taking a bribe.’) He knows she is one of the best-qualified to get a scholarship but she risks getting displaced by lower-ranking students who offer bribes or sex.