Chinua Achebe

摘要

As a boy Chinua Achebe so loved read-Ving that his friends called him "Dictionary". He lived in the library at Government College in Umuahia, in southeastern Nigeria, devouring Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, W.B. Yeats. "They were not about us or people like us," he would say later in his soft, measured voice. But even John Buch-an's stories, in which heroic white men battled and worsted repulsive natives, excited rather than troubled him. It was all "wonderful preparation" for the day when he would start reading between the lines and asking questions.