"Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe, Chapters 1–3

Amalinze was a wily craftsman, but Okonkwo was as slippery as a fish in water.

In his day he was lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow.

He was tall but very thin and had a slight stoop. He wore a haggard and mournful look except when he was drinking or playing on his flute.

He laughed loud and long and his voice rang out clear as the ogene, and tears stood in his eyes. His visitor was amazed, and sat speechless. At the end, Unoka was able to give an answer between fresh outbursts of mirth.

He had discerned a clear overtone of tragedy in the crier's voice, and even now he could still hear it as it grew dimmer and dimmer in the distance.

And so when Okonkwo of Umuofia arrived at Mbaino as the proud and imperious emissary of war, he was treated with great honor and respect, and two days later he returned home with a lad of fifteen and a young virgin.

But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw.

When your neighbors go out with their ax to cut down virgin forests, you sow your yams on exhausted farms that take no labor to clear.

And so at a very early age when he was striving desperately to build a barn through share-cropping Okonkwo was also fending for his father's house.

He had tried to protect them from the smoldering earth by making rings of thick sisal leaves around them. But by the end of the day the sisal rings were burned dry and gray.