R. F. Kuang

In a Nutshell: This was mind-blowing! The personal connect for me as an Indian might have made a little difference but even without that, the impeccable weaving together of facts and fiction with a tinge of magic astounded me.
NOTE: This has been classified as a fantasy. It is not so. Go in with the right expectations. Magical realism fits the content better, though it is mainly ‘dark academia’.


Story Synopsis:

Robin Swift, a Cantonese orphan, is brought to England by his mysterious guardian and trained in classical languages such as Greek and Latin as well as Mandarin (though he knows Cantonese.) Robin knows his destination once he grows up. He is to join Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation at Oxford.
Babel begins as a paradise for geeky Robin, with its endless books, scholars and ‘silver-working’. However, soon he discovers that things aren’t as hunky-dory as they appear. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and it soon boils down to how far Robin is willing to go? How much will he be willing to sacrifice for Babel?
The story comes to us mostly in the third person limited perspective of Robin, with a couple of brief interludes providing a glimpse into the lives of his close friends.

Where the book worked for me:
✔ For a change, the audio ARC had an author’s note, and more importantly, this was right at the start of the book. It clearly delineated how much was fact and how much fiction.

✔ The book presents an alternative history narration of Oxford in the 1830s. But it does such a thorough job that the lines between fact and fiction begin to blur. The author’s research is impeccable, and it shows. I’ve never been to Oxford and yet it came alive before my eyes through the author’s words.

✔ The “magical” part in the story involves using silver and translated words to enhance/add functionality to various objects. It sounds silly when I write it, but it is nicely incorporated into the storyline. The fictional ‘silver revolution’ is supposedly the cause of the real-life industrial revolution, thus the author skilfully takes many real developments such as the steam engine and the telegraph machine and adds her ‘silver magic’ to historical facts. Yet again, kudos to her research.

✔ Just like a scholarly research tome, the book contains quite a few footnotes. Some of this are real incidents, most are fictional. However, their presentation was so authentic that I couldn’t help be dazzled by them. They added just the right level of background detailing to the plot.

✔ The dual identity of the narrator Robin comes out well. While his Cantonese roots make him want to be loyal to China, his British upbringing and education and privilege also makes him want to fit in his adopted country and be of value there. The complications of “belonging” to a one country while resembling a citizen of another are covered well, as are the ideas of racial and colour-based prejudice.

✔ Having a few Indian characters in key roles did add to my fun.


Where the book still worked for me but might not work for other readers:
⚠ I geek out on lingual content. So this book was like a treasure chest for me, what with numerous elaborations on word etymologies, languages, translations, and the interconnection between the tongues spoken across the world. (The author’s background as a translator and scholar reveals itself through these nuggets.) Loved every bit of the vocabulary-related elements. However, if you aren’t too fond of such subject matter, you might be a little bored because there is plenty of it in this book.

⚠ I feel a part of your experience of this book will depend on your own ethnicity and your stance on colonial rule. (Note that I said ‘experience of this book’, not whether you will like it or not.) I am an Indian, and while I don’t believe in continued finger-pointing at what happened in the past--(it’s been 76 years since independence! High time we focus on the future instead of crying about the past, right?)—I still fume at what was done to my nation by those “rulers”. The book doesn’t just focus on the ruthless side of colonial thinking but depicts it in an equally ruthless manner, with no concessions or compromises afforded to the colonial governments. Reading it was almost cathartic! It felt good to see the colonial powers of the past get a taste of their own medicine.

⚠ I knew where things were going towards the finale because the proceedings seemed very much like that the climax of a cult favourite Hindi movie of the mid- 2000s. (If I tell you the name of the movie, the end of the book will be spoilt for you.) Realising the similarity helped me be somewhat better prepared for the end, otherwise I might have been disappointed by it.

⚠ I went into this assuming it was a historical fiction. Seeing the fantastical elements surprised me, but I loved them anyway. I later realised that this book has been classified variously as “Fantasy”. “Urban Fantasy”, “Science Fiction Fantasy”, and “Historical Fantasy.” I think it would be better if you don’t look at it as a Fantasy because that aspect is not the dominant factor in the story. As I said in my initial note, Magical Realism is the best description of the ‘fantasy’ content in the book. You keep that in mind, and you won’t feel let down by the lack of magical world-building and complicated fantastical components.


Where the book could have worked better for me:
❌ The final quarter becomes too dark and slightly farfetched. (I do see how it was the best direction for the story, but that doesn’t mean I had to like it.)

❌ Most of the Whites are villainous and the people of other ethnicities akin to heroes. It seemed somewhat like reverse discrimination. I wish it wouldn’t have been so caricaturish of the Whites.

❌ It was way too long. Having the audiobook helped, but some content in the second half could have been easily trimmed.


The audiobook experience:
The audiobook clocks at a massive 21 hrs 46 min. But when the narrators are great, the length really doesn’t matter much. The main story is narrated by Chris Lew Kum Hoi, and the footnotes are voiced by Billie Fulford-Brown. This dual narration technique works very well for the story because there are an abundant number of footnotes in the content. Having a female voiceover for them makes it easier for us to understand when the book has shifted from the main content (voiced by the male narrator) to the footnote and back again.
Both of the narrators do an excellent job. Considering the length and writing style of this tome, the audiobook is definitely the way to go if you read audiobooks. There is a downloadable PDF map on the publisher’s site if you want a glimpse of Oxford while hearing the story.


I have been impressed many times by either characters or plots, but this is the first time ever a third factor has surpassed both of these – research. How well reality has been fitted around fantasy! I am simply amazed at the mind of this young author. The book does have flaws but in the grand scheme of things, the flaws appear minuscule. Strongly and wholeheartedly recommended.

4.5 stars.

My thanks to HarperCollins UK Audio and NetGalley for the ALC of “Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook.




———————————————
Connect with me through:
My Blog | The StoryGraph | Facebook | Twitter… (altro)

Aspects of this reminded me of the eponymous character from [[The Imaginary Lives of James Poneke]], who comes to England with excited ambitions and soon learns that working for white colonists isn't all it's cracked up to be. Other aspects reminded me of [[Vita Nostra]], whose characters struggle through an education system intended to make them into something in service of a mysterious malevolent power.

The linguistics discussions and copious examples of translation and translation magic absolutely enthralled me, the verisimilitude of the endnotes began to warp my sense of which timeline I was living in, and the deepening plot wouldn't let me put the book down.

(There were references to it being impossible to bring people back from the dead "because we haven’t found a good match-pair in a language where life and death are not in opposition to each other". Which may be so but by the end of the book I was feeling that it ought to be possible to do some tweaking around with corpus/corps/corpse to at least raise a zombie army. This would probably have made for quite a different genre, but maybe a happier one.)… (altro)

In order to like this book, you have to get invested in a ruthless character who is willing to commit war crimes. You also have to be prepared to read unflinching descriptions of these war crimes, made all the more horrifying by the fact that they're directly based on real events that happened in Chinese history. If you can get past all that, then this book is epic, thrilling, and devastating. The main character Rin is a grimdark twist on the strong female protagonist, and her adventures have enormously high stakes that leave you on the edge of your seat. It's set in a fantasy empire based on 20th century China. RF Kuang's background in Chinese history really shines through, and I hope the world she's crafted gets even more detailed in later books in the series.… (altro)

This is a book I had seen but hadn’t heard much about. I had the urge to pick it up and read as a quick read. A fluff piece. A beach read, if I ever went to the beach to read, which I never do. I had been reading some heavy subject matter books lately and I felt a need for a breather. I really expected nothing but something light. The author is more noted for another book which I have but haven’t read yet, Babel.
This book has a very specific demographic, women, ivy leaguers, influencers, dark-publishing, dark-academia, and identity politics. These are not my usual areas of interest, but Yellow Face is ironic and funny and entertaining. It centers around a woman of Chinese-American descent who is about to write a book about WWI Chinese laborers. This is the first joke on readers because nobody would care about that in the reading public but apparently it is all the rage before it even got written by said heroine (Athena Liu) and darling of the publishing world. Of course the book wouldn’t be history but historical fiction with characters larger than life suffering under wartime conditions. I read a lot military fiction and you have to have a real story to get published by a big house. You have to be prisoner of war, win some Medal of Honor, or do something death defying to get a book deal. Hillary Clinton caused the Benghazi debacle and the Gaddafi take down. She has lots of books. You need that type of notoriety to make it in the publishing universe. The premise of Yellowface, even if in the Amy Tan style, is preposterous and that makes it start off fantastically. The rest of the book has lots of twists and turns which were predicably unbelievable. So what? You have to write something down on paper to make the book run along. Every chapter has some face off between two people who, in the words of The Karate Kid, have to have their leg wept out from under them. This is the best part of the book and maintains the dramatic tension chapter after chapter. The final chapter of the book betrays R. F. Kuang’s world view with is disappointingly stock Ivy League which is nihilism within a world without absolutes. I was not expecting such a dour message to leave the readers with but maybe the bitterness of the characters in Yellowface is something in Kuang after all. This book is so topical that it might be neglected after only a few years have elapsed. This is worth reading for women, and for the perspective it gives on the variations of identity politics by people without a clear understanding of the underlying origins of cultural deconstruction.… (altro)