Katabasis

Another R.F. Kuang book, another conundrum. I was expecting another Babel going into this, but Katabasis was most definitely not. And I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. Well, let’s get started!

The first half of the book was pretty awful. Every second Alice and Peter spent in hell bickering with each other was so incredibly annoying; the writing felt very cringey and juvenile in comparison with the plot, which was supposed to be complex. For an example, I never want to hear the words “pizza anus” ever. It’s not funny or clever. It sounds stupid. It was little situations and mentions like these that made me laugh because of how ridiculous everything was. And again, the bickering. Alice and Peter’s constant yapping didn’t add anything to the plot or provide any useful information about them. I was not interested in reading it. 

Another problem that is especially bad in the first half is the constant name dropping. I’m currently reading Gödel, Escher, Bach, but I wasn’t expecting to see Gödel, Escher, AND Bach in this one book. And also Borges, Dante (the main one) and a bunch of other people who’s names I don’t know yet. I think supplementing the journey through hell with the speculation of ancient philosophers is a great idea, but not when it’s this many. I think Kuang should have focused on 1 or 2 good authors to reference, rather than shallowly covering a whole bunch. This writing reminds me an awful lot of the academics Peter and Alice met in Pride, who constantly berate others for not being as ‘well read’ as them; which is ironic, because Kuang is satirizing those kinds of people. There is one reference that particularly irks me: 

“Borges had written once of a distant wildfire, colored the pink of a leopard’s gums… She wondered if this was Borges’s leopard. Fire in a maw, ravenous flame.”

This is in a fight scene where Alice is looking into the mouth of a monster. I get that maybe she is thinking of this because she is an academic and that’s her natural thought process, but in the book format, this reference does not affect me or develop the plot in any way. I was just annoyed that such an interesting writer was reduced to this annoyingly simple mention in Katabasis. 

But despite everything I said, this is one of the most readable books I’ve read recently. What I mean is, even though every sentence made me mad, I was interested and invested enough to continue. The writing is technically masterful, grabbing the attention of the reader throughout the novel. And that brings us to the second half. 

The story got SO much better. The critiques of sexism and ablism in academia were perfectly done. In Babel, Kuang’s problem was that the depiction of racism ended up as a caricature that made it really difficult to be invested. But in Katabasis, I was eagerly following the backstory of Alice and Peter’s relationship, and the struggles they went through because of their professor’s abuse. The ending with leaving the professor behind in hell was so satisfying. The reason is that Alice had to go through an entire character arc; she started off blindly obedient to her professor, being an unreliable narrator, which leads the reader to believe he must not have been a bad guy. But the reveals in the second half make us realize Alice’s perspective was skewed. She thought sexism had to be ignored, and calling it out was cringe. And her journey to realizing that is most definitely not the case is very compelling. And by the end, I was also a itty bitty tiny bit happy that they ended up together. Again, the characters were far more sympathizable this time around. 

But does all this make up for the frustrating first half? I don’t think so. I mean, it’s not like the second half is absolutely perfect; the wandering and fighting dragged out WAY too long before the finale. But I think I am excited to see how Kuang will improve her craft further. 

5/10, because the first half was truly bad, and because the second half made me hopeful for the future.