Perspective Shifting: A Review of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

And just like that things did fall apart.

Things Fall Apart
By Chinua Achebe

Review

There’s a tremendous subtlety in this novel. A tremendous amount of restraint with details, and a thorough understanding of which details to share. Ultimately culminating with a line drenched with irony that summed up the way the intruders really felt about the natives of the land.

I’ve heard a lot about this book, but I was honestly a little intimidated to pick it up. Like I’ve said before about other books, why? Why didn’t I read this sooner? This isn’t the first novel I’ve read written from the perspective of the people who’d been oppressed. But it’s somehow the most impactful. It was, as was the whole book, a very subtle shift, but it was a shift nonetheless.

I’m no stranger to the effects of colonialism and the reasons driving it, but there was something about this book that really drove it home.