Babel

This book by R.F. Kuang was a wild ride. I know that most of the internet loved Babel, but I definitely had some problems with it. This was not my first book by R.F. Kuang; I have read Yellowface, and I thought that was great! It was the perfect amount of uncomfortable truth and funny. But Babel was something else entirely. First, let me talk about the good things. 

I love reading about translating. Translation is an art: bringing the original meaning across the barrier of language without polluting it with your own biases. Unfortunately, humans are inherently biased, and every translation is bound to have it’s meaning influenced by the translator. When it comes to Western countries translating texts of other races, cultural erasure often occurs. I talked about this with my post on The Epic of Gilgamesh, but basically, if something that is deemed morally wrong by Christian standards appear on ancient texts of other cultures, the Christian translators will often misrepresent words or even flat out not translate certain parts. This is a phenomenon I am really interested in! The first half of Babel was basically long paragraphs explaining the translation magic system, and that really worked for me. Her integration of the idea of cultural erasure and general nerdiness about translations was respectable.  However, pretty much every other aspect of the book failed to do something for me. 

First of all, the characters. These guys were just so forgettable, personality lacking, and flat. It is impossible to appreciate a book fully when the characters in it don’t even feel real. I can’t even put my finger on why that is! It’s like they are all missing some motivation or detail that makes them feel alive and not vessels to carry out the plot. The relationships between the characters also feel very fake. I remember there being instances where their friendships were built through the author telling us, and not showing us; Like in one part, Robin (I had to search his name up because I quite literally don’t remember him) tells us, the reader, about moments of his friendship with Ramy, and how close they were. The problem is, I don’t remember reading any moments like that back when they were supposed to be friends, because they were only carrying out the plot. It all feels like a very fake way to develop the relationships between characters. This is also why I never felt sad during the character deaths. I couldn’t relate to any of them, because they felt like caricatures (or at least, only representative) of their races, not like actual people. 

Then the plot. I could not have imagined a more unsatisfying way the story could have headed in the second half of the book. I don’t know what I would rather read about, but it certainly isn’t Robin killing his dad, running away to join the resistance, and blowing up the Tower of Babel with everyone inside it, even though they agreed to make the sacrifice. It was all very unexpected, but not in the good way. 

And then the final message. I love the idea of discussing cultural erasure and racism when it comes to translations. That is a very relevant and important discussion to have. I just feel like Babel was not the way to do it. Coming back to the characters feeling like caricatures, the story felt overly simplistic in the message it was trying to send. Robin, Ramy, and Victoire are solely defined by their race and their oppression by the British. They are the good guys. Letty, a white girl is part of their friend circle, and doesn’t always understand their struggles. She ends up betraying them all and going to the Dark Side of the Force. White individuals like Letty certainly do exist; but because Letty is solely defined by her race and privilege, she ends up representative of all white people. The message ends up being that white individuals can’t and will not try to understand what oppression feels like. That they are irredeemably racist. But the reality is so much more complicated than that. Letty became Robin, Ramy, and Victoire’s friend for a reason. While she may be insensitive to their struggles, I would have expected her to still be their ally, not go comically off the rails and become their enemy. The reason the message of racism doesn’t hit is probably because the characters don’t have any personality outside of their race. Without developed characters, it  is impossible to deliver nuanced messages about how well-meaning people can be racist. Again, my problem is not that Letty is racist. My problem is that she doesn’t act like a real, complicated human being, and is just a vessel for Kuang to share the moral of the story. 

My feelings on Babel are definitely complicated. I am not sure if I articulated them in the best way. But I would actually recommend reading Babel for yourself, because while I don’t think it’s that good of a book, I do think it’s a good case study of an interesting book that was not developed the right way. 

Update: Overall, gets a 6/10. Points deducted for the reasons mentioned above, but was definitely memorable.