Babel: The SUNDAY TIMES and #1 NEW YORK TIMES bestseller

‘Babel Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution’ is an alternative history/fantasy by R.F. Kuang.I complemented my reading with its unabridged audiobook edition, allowing for an immersive experience. The audiobook was narrated by Chris Lew Kum Hoi and Billie Fulford-Brown.What an extraordinary novel! As I have been disappointed by a few highly anticipated fantasy novels this year, I approached ‘Babel’ with caution. However, right from its opening pages I found myself enthralled and completely caught up in its story, characters, and setting.Having previously read Kuang’s ‘The Poppy War’ trilogy I probably should have had more faith as I had been impressed by her writing and skilful blend of history and fantasy.‘Babel’ is a substantial novel in size and complex in its subject matter. As such it is difficult to summarise, so just a few details for context.Oxford, 1836. In this alternative Victorian Britain, the city of dreaming spires is the nexus point of all knowledge and progress in the world. At its centre is Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation, the tower from which all the power of the Empire flows. Magic associated with enchanted silver has provided the foundation for the growth of the British Empire. Yet at what price?As a young boy Robin Swift had been orphaned in Canton and brought to Britain by Professor Lovell, who takes on the role of guardian, albeit a stern one. Initially Robin receives private instruction in a variety of subjects, including languages, until he is ready to be admitted to Babel. There he bonds with a small group of his fellow ‘Babblers’. He inadvertently stumbles across a secret society and after learning of their goals agrees to aid them. Yet there are conflicting factors that will, as the full title indicates, eventually bring about a revolution.With ‘Babel’ R.F. Kuang has written a powerful historical fantasy that unflinchingly addresses issues linked to colonialism and racism. It is bold yet sublime. I found her world building detailed and immaculate as its various aspects emerged organically.With respect to the audiobook, I felt that both narrators were excellent. Chris Lew Kum Hoi served as the main reader and I felt that he brought a great deal of energy to his narration. The footnotes that appear in the text were read by Billie Fulford-Brown. I found that hearing a different voice helped with the narrative flow between the central story and the footnotes that served to expand on various points in this fictional history.Overall, I feel that ‘Babel’ is a masterpiece, a scholarly work of dark academia that boldly addresses the legacy of history. Without doubt ‘Babel’ is one of my top novels for 2022.Very highly recommended.

Set in the early 1800s, Robin Swift is brought to London by Professor Lovell to train in Latin and Greek and eventually attend Oxford University, where he will be a ‘Babler’ after being orphaned by cholera in Canton. Bablers study languages at the University Institute of Translation, aka Babel. Here, there is a special type of silverwork done whereby silver bars are produced and on one side is a word is engraved in one language, and on the other side of the bar is a translation of that word in English. When these words are spoken, the bar enables certain things to happen which would not be possible otherwise – this is the magic element. For example, maybe a silver bar makes horses tire less easily, or steam engines require less fuel to keep running at high speed. Perhaps the right words can make the bearer invisible, and perhaps the right words can kill. However, not just anyone can use these bars. To activate them, the speaker must be more than fluent in both the languages inscribed on the bar – they must think and dream in both languages. I do like that the magic system here is entirely unique. Also I love the whole power of words angle.There were parts of this book where the pacing was terrible. Having noticed this as somewhat of a trend with this author, I can not help but feel like what she is trying to achieve is that sense of time being unfixed for the reader. You know, how sometimes time can drag and an hour can feel like a month, and other times you blink and the day is gone. I feel like more practice is needed with this though because as things stand, it can make a pretty jarring reading experience at times. It would have been great if, in those slower moments, we could have had more development of the relationships between Robin and his friends, build on the chemistry more, and make the ups and downs of their friendships matter more by showing us how and why they mean so much to each other, rather than just telling us that they all love one another. In fact, there is quite a lot of telling rather than showing in this book, in a way that at times feels quite condescending and it irritated me because, your readers are either able to understand the literary terms you are using and as such do not need basic things explaining to them like this – or they do not, in which case the technical terms kind of feels like the author is just showing off about all the big words that she knows. And Oh My Gawd the footnotes! The freaking footnotes in this book!!! I would advise reading on Kindle as it’s easy to hover and read the footnotes without having to physically flip through pages. Some might be fine doing that with a physical copy, I just know it would have infuriated me even further. At best R.F. Kuang is trying to make her book readable for everyone, but in doing this she massively misses the mark for any specific target audience.That being said, I did like the characters, I thought that they were really interesting and showed a lot of promise, which is why I wanted more from them and more tension and chemistry between them all. I also loved the tension over the Hermes Society and knowing that eventually Robin would get caught as he is a terrible liar. That being said there is a good section of the book from this one scene before they have this excursion to China and when they return to Oxford that felt like it could have just been completely cut from the book.I loved the premise of the plot for this book. I guess I would agree that translation is an act of theft because translators have to make this choice when translating a text from one language to another. They can do it word for word and possibly lose the meaning and not have it make grammatical sense in the translation; or they can focus on keeping the story and the message the same, even if they have to say it differently. As such, there will always be losses in translation.I did not see the end coming. There is an act of betrayal that blind-sighted me more than it possibly should have upon reflection, and there is a loss that I found sad, although I’d have been much more aggrieved by this if relationships throughout the entire book had been better written. However, the ending was pretty perfect. In fact, the entire section that builds up to that ending is fantastic and I can’t be critical about it because I just don’t see any other way it could have or should have been done. It was fantastically delivered.Overall, it feels like R.F.Kuang excels when writing about etymology, war and history because these are her comfort zones. Where she is terrible at writing is chemistry and relationships and I would love these areas to be tackled, perhaps she could do some writing exercises to practice this because if she got this down, as an author she would be absolutely stratospheric.Overall, I did enjoy reading this book – yes it took quite a bit longer than expected to read – mostly because of the pacing – I ended up taking a break in the middle and reading something else – but I did enjoy the book. It’s probably not a re-read for me, and I am glad it’s a standalone. This book scored a 7/10 for me on CAWPILE, which means it does just scrape in at the 4 stars although, if I’m honest it’s probably more of a 3.5 for the whole book, but, I allowed for the 4-star rating because of the ending and the action surrounding the ending.

This is the first book in a while that's left me truly speechless. It starts off sad, and slowly builds until Chekhov's gun fires and the tower comes crumbling down.There are so many things I could say about this book, I'm not really sure where to begin, so I guess I'll start at the beginning. At the start of the book, Babel is shown as a wonderful and amazing creation that benefits all. However even then you see the mask begin to slip, the hints of cruelty and indifference. As the story continues, the mask slips more and more until you're staring into the mass of harm and rot Babel had become, still keeping up its smile even with the newly visible blood dripping from its wealth.Speaking of slow changes in perspective, Robin was an amazing choice as the main character! He starts off falling into the appeal of Babel and what it offers, buying into its disguise as he's gifted the riches stolen from foreign lands without understanding the pain that got it there. There's even a scene in the book early on where Robin sees a homeless family and tosses literal pennies from his limitless budget at them, which was a perfect metaphor for how Babel as a whole acted. Tossing pennies at the poor people while patting itself on the back and ignoring the actual horrors of what's happening. As the story goes on though, he starts seeing the cracks in the walls and the gaps in the mask. Watching his character's descent from a peaceful but cowardly kid into the determined martyr that was willing to tear down an empire with its own creation was somehow both extremely satisfying and extremely haunting.The commentary on violence was also incredibly thought out and explained. One thing this book did particularly well was showing arguments for both sides. Neither the violent nor the peaceful side were dumbed down to make the message easier, but the effects and results of the actions still made an extremely convincing argument. Another thing I loved about this book was the realism when showing the ways the characters affected the world. It showed clearly that revolutions weren't just everyone vs the government, the fighting isn't glamorous or fair, and the people's reactions and ideas were always reasonable for their character.Babel as a whole also makes an amazing metaphor. It shows you the side you'd see if you lived there at the time, all the luxury and none of the violence. The people weren't shown the silver mines, or the opium dens, or the fields of plants entire cities were leveled to grow. It really made me process for the first time why it took so long for significant movements against colonialism to form. This book also did an amazing job of showing that some people will stare directly at the belly of the beast and still choose to look away since that's easier than confronting what they'd ignored for years.All of that coming to an end as Babel, doomed to one day fall beneath its own claws, was crushed by the very thing it claimed to idealize and fought to protect. The languages and silver stolen from faraway lands became the very things that brought about Babel's downfall.

Intrigante demais e muito bem escrito, difícil ler um capítulo só, a história prende demais!!

La trama, avvincente e ben strutturata, tiene il lettore incollato fino all'ultima pagina. È facile capire perché sia diventato un bestseller sia per il "Sunday Times" che per il "New York Times". Un libro imperdibile per chi ama storie ben costruite e significative!

“𝑮𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒇 𝒔𝒖𝒇𝒇𝒐𝒄𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒅. 𝑮𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒇 𝒑𝒂𝒓𝒂𝒍𝒚𝒔𝒆𝒅. 𝑮𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒇 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒂 𝒄𝒓𝒖𝒆𝒍, 𝒉𝒆𝒂𝒗𝒚 𝒃𝒐𝒐𝒕 𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒔𝒆𝒅 𝒔𝒐 𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒅 𝒂𝒈𝒂𝒊𝒏𝒔𝒕 𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒄𝒉𝒆𝒔𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒉𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒃𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒉𝒆.“This has to be one of the most wonderfully well-written books that I have read. It is a book where the writing made me want to know how it was written, the whole process behind it and by the end of it I was crying out of sadness and pure wonder like I’d watched a great thing collapse. (iykyk)The way Kuang has incorporated language and linguistics into the text feels impossible even while reading it, that too not just one language but multiple ancient languages. The constant feeling of awe while reading such an influential text as it moved through multiple themes like power struggle, culture, identity, colonialism, the importance of language and translation, racism and politics was ever present. The attention to detail and perfection of Kuang is evident and the rigorous research that would’ve been done is so remarkable I can’t even begin to imagine.The characters are charmingly complex and layered. Robin, in the continuous dilemma of being loyal to his culture while working for the British. Ramy, the rebellious one always standing up against discrimination. Victoire, filled with determination to survive no matter what comes her way. These characters show the tenacity that humans portray in the face of adversity when they are hanging by the last thread. Then there is Letty, who is so glad for the opportunity of being able to study and work that she pays no attention to the prejudice that her friends have to face on a daily basis and doesn’t understand how they can even think to give it all up.The plot is beautiful, it’s like a slow-burn romance but with freedom and liberation. The ending left me miserable and throughout the book it felt like I was a tiny little part of it all, which is the best feeling a reader can hope for.

Received the book today, so this isn’t a review of the actual story.I bought the hardcover and it came with faulty binding which made the cover a bit twisted and bent, the dust cover also was crinkled due to this. I kinda regret buying the hardcover since it’s not nice looking and is more expensive than the pocket version.