Share for friends:

Read Girls At War And Other Stories (1991)

Girls at War and Other Stories (1991)

Online Book

Author
Genre
Rating
3.78 of 5 Votes: 4
Your rating
ISBN
0385418965 (ISBN13: 9780385418966)
Language
English
Publisher
anchor books

Girls At War And Other Stories (1991) - Plot & Excerpts

What do you do when you are in the middle of several lengthy novels, and have library books which you haven't even started yet which are due in a few short days? Why, you check out another book, a short story collection by an author whose 'opus' is a novel you read over a decade ago for your World Civilizations course, and which you remember slightly less than the conversations you and your friend had about the guy in Buddy Holly glasses two rows behind who your friend wanted to make out with, and who you found out years later was the childhood best friend of the first boy who would eventually break your heart. Naturally, this is what you do, as the book clearly made an indelible impression on you.I do not make good decisions, though. I am impulsive and insatiable in most aspects of life, and trips to the library are no exception. So I read it, and it was...pretty good for the most part. I mean, I definitely get that there are a lot of important topics addressed in this: a broken Nigerian financial structure, a bombed-out and constantly hazardous war-torn Nigerian landscape, the clash of Western values concerning language, spirituality, environmental protection, and gender dynamics with traditional, deep-seeded Nigerian cultural specificities, etc. I find the subject incredibly fascinating and obviously important to consider in depth, the whole Manifest Destiny FTW argument, and Achebe is pretty good at maintaining a level of sensitivity and broad-mindedness concerning the complexities involved in deciphering what is growth and what is cultural genocide, what is ethnocentrism and what is humanitarianism, while still showing reverence for his personal and societal capital-H History. Muddy waters, that. Over a series of decades, Achebe composed these tiny snapshots of different aspects of the transition, from a young genius who attempts to murder an infant because she has deprived of a free education and forced into nannyhood for a family getting rich in Western dollars, to a man finally blessed with a small amount of money to care for his wife and the 3 of his 4 children who managed to make it out of a collapsing, war-ravaged terrain with their lives, only to find a band of Nigerian thugs pounding on his door in the middle of the very night he receives the money, firing machine guns in the air and calmly advising that he give over every bit of money he has because they totally won't rape his wife and daughters if he does so, no big deal, Papa. Yeesh, right? A living, breathing post-apocalyptic, every-man-for-himself type of world. These stories, though technically fictional, are of course not far from realities faced at this time in this location, and throughout the developing world ad nauseam. Bleak subject matter, well written, measured and thought-provoking. The three star rating is simply for the collection, because there was a bit of drag involved in some of them, and the prose didn't make me want to hang my head out of a speeding car and scream 'fuck yeaaaaaaaaah!' into the night air. Still worth more than its weight, though, which is approximately one ounce.I'm glad I read it, but I should probably be more concerned with knocking these other ones out, then hiding my library card for a while. I already have a sizable stack of books against the wall to my immediate left, for Christ's sake.

There is good growth and there is bad growth. The belly does not bulge out only with food and drink; it might be the abominable disease which would end by sending its sufferer our of the house even before he was fully dead. (p. 46)I wanted to remember why I loved Achebe so much after the mild letdown of his memoir, There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra. This is why: stark, simple presentation of symbolically loaded stories that he never unpacks for the reader. Like Hemingway, I prefer it when he shows, as here, rather than tells, as there.

What do You think about Girls At War And Other Stories (1991)?

This collection of stories from three different decades feels a bit strange, just in the different personalities of the stories from different times. The stories from the 1950s and 60s often have a quiet gentility, an observational quality that was almost a little distancing for me. "The Madman" is a social portrait of reversal of roles on market day between a wandering lunatic and a young man trying to rise up the social ladder; "Marriage Is A Private Affair" tells a tale of family tension around a mixed marriage; in "Akueke" four brothers fail their sister and grandfather during her sickness and lose their familial links to both; and a story like "Chike's School Days" almost seems to have no plot development at all. "The Sacrificial Egg", set in the midst of a horrible smallpox plague, has a greater sense of direness and action than most of the other earlier stories, but most of them come from an almost tranquil place, which I found a little harder to access.There's a real enjoyment in these 'social portrait' stories, please don't misunderstand me. For a relatively poor and untraveled fellow like me, the stories are a great opportunity to enjoy what the Chinese saying describes: "The reader can travel around the world without leaving his home." It's a wonderful glimpse into a world of great cultural differences and great human commonalities, providing an opportunity to compare and contrast with the cultures I've known. It's also neat to see social critique within a culture ("Vengeful Creditor" almost seems to be an embryonic version of A Man of the People, even though the story is five years younger than the satirical novel). It's a fascinating simultaneous embrace and criticism of one's own culture. But then come the last three stories from the aftermath of the Biafran War and a new intensity suffuses these stories. Like the world Christopher Hedges describes in War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, life seems so much more vivid under the conditions of war. Survival means so much more, as do patriotism, loyalty, friendship, desire, and need. "Sugar Baby" revolves around the character Cletus' miserable addiction to sugar in a time when it can't be found. Instead of feeling small and distancing as it might have in the earlier stories, the narrator's harsh judgment of Cletus seems absolute and total. Cletus has humiliated himself, abased his character and alienated a woman who loved him for a half dozen sugar cubes. We know everything about him we could ever need to know from the narrator's stories about him. In "Girls At War" and "Civil Peace", the various actors' strength of character, senses of honor, and personal ethics also come into sharpest relief. If they are great souls, it becomes clear. If they are venal, it shows. The desperation of the times reveals all, lays bare the inner fortitude of Achebe's characters. Maybe I am a victim of the small-minded dependency on war culture that Hedges described, but these three stories are those that most struck me in this beautiful little book.
—Josephus FromPlacitas

A nice collection of short stories from Achebe. I wasn't quite fascinated by the content, as it seemed to be a set of recurring ideas linked strongly to Igbo culture and their way of life, which is probably very distinct in most of Achebe's works. However, I loved a couple of references that led me back to the days when I was much younger and would curl up with my copy of 'Things Fall Apart' when there was nothing else to read. 'The Madman' wasmy favourite, closely followed by 'Girls At War'. Three stars.
—Jama Jack

Before I get to ranting, a disclaimer: Quite a few of these stories are really funny and warm, and I found myself chuckling. "My belief is that a child who will be somebody will be somebody whether he goes to school or not." Spoken by a callous, and of course wealthy, man to his impoverished teenaged nanny. The government offers free education, then takes it away and the newspapers gloat. A girl is sent to work by her mother who once gave up on good marriage prospects for a manual laborer, who her missionaries thought would be closer to Jesus, and sees her own education prospects dashed. While reading this collection of short stories, many which centered on the hopes and disappointments of education, I was repeatedly reminded of the "you don't need college" schtick of Rick Santorum, or that other fool, Andrew Sullivan, who once posted an article by a burnt out adjunct, entitled "Please! Don't go to college." Sullivan was smugly riding the words of its author, an exhausted composition teacher, who had he decent benefits and fair compensation for the work he'd now concluded was meaningless, would have likely retained some of his commitment to his students. Things sure are the same all over. And this is how they fall apart.
—Sara

Write Review

(Review will shown on site after approval)

Read books by author Chinua Achebe

Read books in category Fiction