Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

I think the shear number of tragic stories I've read in my lifetime sort of spoiled the impact of this one for me. I know it's famous and compared to the great Greek tragedies and has sold millions of copies -- yeah it is tragic and it was very interesting to be exposed to such an exotic people, with their rituals and gods and lifestyle -- but it was pretty hard for me to get past all the misogyny and random cruelty that this "great man" imposed upon his family, and I felt nothing at the conclusion.

This little passage here gives me a misplaced sense of snide self-satisfaction:

"When nearly two years later Obierika paid another visit to his friend in exile the circumstances were less happy. The missionaries had come to Umuofia. They had built their church there, won a handful of converts and were already sending evangelists to the surrounding towns and villages. That was a source of great sorrow to the leaders of the clan, but many of them believed that the strange faith and the white man's god would not last. None of his converts was a man whose word was heeded in the assembly of the people. None of them was a man of title. They were mostly the kind of people that were called efulefu, worthless, empty men. The imagery of an efulefu in the language of the clan was a man who sold his machete and wore the sheath to battle. Chielo, the priestess of Agbala, called the converts the excrement of the clan, and the new faith was a mad dog that had come to eat it up." (143)

(1958. New York: Random House, 1994)