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A review by megancortez
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
4.0
I really enjoyed the writing - the language was vibrant with a velvety cadence. It was superbly pleasant to read!
It felt more like a collection of vignettes than a novel because there wasn't necessarily one particularly central plot. Okonkwo is an interesting character whose customs and cultural values differ dramatically from my own and part of what I appreciated about this book is the self-aware tension it cultivates between one's known culture and everyone else's. There is a necessary divide between what one knows and what they don't - and this book teases that divide in sometimes uncomfortable ways - to seemingly step up and say: you can't really know a person until you understand where they came from, even (and especially) if you don't like where they came from.
I feel like this settles as a 3.5/5 for me, but I'm rounding up for the review. There were moments where the story shot off a proverbial Chekhov's gun only to leave that end totally untied, which added some feelings of aimlessness to the book and took away from my enjoyment of it a bit.
All that to say, I did find it worth the read; and would recommend it to anyone who wants to feel a little bit of controlled tension, a little bit of contemplation, a little bit of the ennui of life: to feel the way that things...fall apart.
It felt more like a collection of vignettes than a novel because there wasn't necessarily one particularly central plot. Okonkwo is an interesting character whose customs and cultural values differ dramatically from my own and part of what I appreciated about this book is the self-aware tension it cultivates between one's known culture and everyone else's. There is a necessary divide between what one knows and what they don't - and this book teases that divide in sometimes uncomfortable ways - to seemingly step up and say: you can't really know a person until you understand where they came from, even (and especially) if you don't like where they came from.
I feel like this settles as a 3.5/5 for me, but I'm rounding up for the review. There were moments where the story shot off a proverbial Chekhov's gun only to leave that end totally untied, which added some feelings of aimlessness to the book and took away from my enjoyment of it a bit.
All that to say, I did find it worth the read; and would recommend it to anyone who wants to feel a little bit of controlled tension, a little bit of contemplation, a little bit of the ennui of life: to feel the way that things...fall apart.