Reviews with content warning for Suicide - Babel: An Arcane History

Reviews tagging 'Suicide'

Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang

605 reviews

katiesully1000's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

A true masterpiece.

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butlerebecca's review

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adventurous challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Wish this was 100 pages shorter but feels ridiculous to give this less than 5 stars

Truly baffled by how one person can make a book that’s both academically specific and written with such beautiful prose

It took adjusting to adapt to the magical realism/fantasy elements but I really like how it simplified and represented the complicated facts of colonial empire

Learned a lot too - felt like what people do with hiding medication in peanut butter for dogs - like oh here’s a novel whoops bonus you also just read a textbook!

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ira_22_3's review

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dark reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I wanted to love this book. It just did not tickle my pickle. In saying that, here are some things I throroughly enjoyed. As someone who loves a bit of etymology, the notes on words and the detail of match-pairs was super interesting. The author also manages to talk about race, colonialism and activism with such sense that it really gets you thinking, especially as a white person. The ending was super powerful.
HOWEVER. The plot didn't feel very intentional to me, it seemed to drag on and either spend way too much time on things or jump from one thing to the other. I didn't particularly connect with any of the characters, nor did I understand their actions at times. I'm sad to say that it just wasn't for me.

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aturb92's review

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challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

This book is only getting three stars because I enjoyed the first couple hundred pages so much, and genuinely wanted to love it. For how much struggle the four main characters go through I feel there was no depth to them. Other than being minorities at Oxford, which isn’t a personality type but a fact of each of their lives. For how talented I have heard Kuang is, I feel she could have made them more relatable and alive.
We wont’ talk about the ending, but it is what it is.

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jiwiz's review

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective tense medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes

4.0

I'll start off with a disclaimer; This was my first time listening to an audiobook, and I've often had trouble paying attention to audio so there may be some portions that I missed. For example, I didn't realise Robin was wasian until much later than when it was revealed. Even so, I was captivated by the story.

I'd describe this book in one sentence as a loud 'Fuck you' to western colonialism. I've seen people criticise how on-the-nose it is. It drives its point home in such a glaringly obvious way that it's impossible to misinterpret it. I'm not sure exactly how I feel about that quality. There are definitely moments where I think it could've been communicated more subtly. The magic system was also a little difficult for me to understand, but maybe that's the audiobook effect, or it was meant to be a little abstract. I did enjoy the characters. I saw myself a lot in Robin.

Overall, I enjoyed it. Solid read for someone like me with a very casual interest in language and etymology!

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lailaps's review

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challenging informative inspiring medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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johannaplatt's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

Low fantasy tale set in the 1830s. This book ended up taking a path I did not expect, but massively enjoyed. The narratives about rampant colonialism and the impact of the British Empire were insightful and interesting. Obviously the silver bars are fictional, but stealing resources from colonized countries happened, with the expectation that native people should be thankful for being shown how to be "civilised". I felt really connected to the core four and their friendship - I think we have all had a friend where we connect deeply very quickly. Weaving in worker strikes was clever and showed another aspect of how colonialism also hurts those at the bottom of society in the home land. I was gripped by this book from start to finish.

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marygeer's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Wow. RF Kuang is truly a genius! I felt like this book was written specifically for me. I spend a lot of time romanticizing my PhD program, knowing full and well the ivory tower that it is. Because what’s the alternative? To face the racism, sexism, and elitism it was built upon? The author made me revisit what it was like to enter the academic culture for the first time and have this veil lifted. I find it terrifying the amount of “Lovells” and “Playfairs” that still exist today.

What really worked for me was the cohort of Robin, Ramy, Victoire, and Letty. Each a different race and from a different background. I obviously identified most with Letty, the white woman. She fought tooth and nail for her position, with no one helping her- why would women get an education if they would be married off? Letty as a character really made me reflect on how my whiteness and my sex influence my beliefs and morals.

I also loved the etymology and fantasy elements. The idea that some sort of “meaning” is lost in every translation, and that meaning manifests as magic through alchemy. It’s such a neat and thoughtful concept.

Finally I have to talk about the necessity of violence. This is an idea that- like Letty- I struggle with. The book makes it clear that violence is the only way to demand the respect of an empire. Not because of the cause, but because of the system it wants to rebel. But where do we draw the line? I will be thinking about this for days to come. I have so many other thoughts on survival, death, and friendship as well…

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kaamezcua2's review

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dark emotional inspiring sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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mereas's review

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dark emotional slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

A contemporary classic in literature. By the end, I felt simultaneously ruined and astonished by Rebecca F. Kuang's work. She covers the most existential questions in the frame of language and translation. The foundation of etymology and epistemology in the scene of colonialism and systematic oppression are narrated under one boy, Robin Swift, who is half-Chinese and half-English. I found the saddest aspect to this novel being that we never truly know his native name, of which was chosen by his late (Chinese) mother, and I cannot fathom the weight immigrants hold when they are told their names are too hard, complicated, or otherwise foreign for the English man. This also includes the erasure that colonial structures translate upon the foreign body, for they are left with no name nor grave. Rebecca F. Kuang leaves us to question whether protest and resistance should be violent or nonviolent to produce systematic change, in similar vein to the Civil Rights Movement.

Besides the foundation to this historical fantasy, the found-family trope touched my soul. I am a sucker for the most of unlikely friends to become a group of four. Between the lines, there are undertones of queer sentiments that also resonated with me, though they do not go further than just that. This, I did not mind because the characters are constantly in survival mode whether physically or emotionally. The reality underneath Rebecca F. Kuang's words is like a goldfish peaking above the water's surface--the social arguments always felt natural and fluid, which hurt the most.

Language holds so much power, yet it can just as easily be lost.
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On a side note, I love to find authors' favorite diction. Rebecca F. Kuang is biased to: teeter, tranquility, translation.
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"'What you don't understand,' said Ramy, 'is how much people like you will excuse if it just means they can get tea and coffee on their breakfast tables. They don't care, Letty. They just don't care'" (356).

"'Because you're a good translator.' Ramy leaned back on his elbows. 'That's just what translation is, I think. That's all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they're trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands'" (535).

"Oxford relied on silver, how without the constant labour of its translation corps, of the talent it attracted from abroad, it immediately fell apart. It revealed more than the power of translation. It revealed the sheer dependence of the British, who, astonishingly, could not manage to do basic things like bake bread or get safely from one place to another without words stolen from other countries" (471). This, made me question what else can stand in for silver. Oil. Petroleum. Fast fashion. And, at what cost?

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