A review by calebph
Heart of Darkness by Chinua Achebe, Joseph Conrad

adventurous dark informative reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

I read a lot of reviews lambasting this book as “racist”. I assumed it was mostly just zoomers whining about a book that was written in a time before they were born. Nope. There’s some passages in here that made me crinkle my nose and think, “ah, that’s the racism they mentioned”. It’s hard to decouple the racism from a book inherently about colonialism from the POV of the white guys doing the colonizing. A lot of folks have derided the book as being just another one of those ol’ things, but baby, Joseph Conrad wrote the book(s) on the matter…

 I was about to yap about this book for paragraphs, but I’m suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to not to. Good book. Fun Congo river adventure with lots of colonialism. Norton edition had some great essays too. Only read a few of them, but they were fantastic.
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