Katabasis
RF Kuang
I really, really wanted to like this...
...and I expected I would. I think R.F. Kuang is an extraordinarily talented author. That sentence is in the present tense, because I still believe it, even after being disappointed by Katabasis. You'll see from my three-star rating that I was not enchanted. To be honest, three stars feels generous. This was a long, difficult slog. But the best parts were very good. These happen mostly towards the end.
Indeed the first half of the book (up to the 58% point) was an achingly tedious pageant of scholarly name-dropping. Our hero, Alice Law, appears to want to let us know that she is familiar with the canon of philosophy and mathematics and also knows a whole lot of languages. It's strange, because Alice clearly realizes it is not a thing one should do.
Anyhow, Professor Grimes hated peacocking. She knew this because once she had been caught up with the thrill of competition herself. At her first conference—after a dizzying night of cocktails with students from Oxford and London, all comparing the sizes of their stipends, their research budgets, who had recently published where—she had gone up to Professor Grimes in the hotel lobby and blustered, drunk on superiority, “Can you believe they don’t have a proseminar at Imperial?” She had thought he might laugh, that they could share this condescension. But he had looked down at her with such blistering disdain. “Don’t play stupid games, Law.”
For a reader it is difficult to avoid the impression that Kuang herself is showing off.
In part, I expected to enjoy Katabasis because I usually enjoy when a story-teller revisits places and experiences of my own life. Alice was an undergrad at Cornell (as was I) and is a graduate student at Cambridge University (where I spent some years as a postdoc). And, above all, Katabasis is about being a grad student. Don't be fooled by the title and the publisher's plot description. Katabasis is not really the story of a katabasis. Most of the story, and definitely all the best parts of the story, are about being a grad student in a PhD program.
It's a good subject for a novel. Grad school is an intense experience. For me it was a positive one -- life-changing in the best way. I was lucky -- it is a Hell for some. Two grad students I was personally acquainted with committed suicide.
Katabasis is not a good novel, but it contains one, I believe.
From the reviews I've been starting to see, it sounds like this one is proving controversial. And by that I mean I haven't seen any particularly favourable reviews yet, lol. Thankfully it never made it to my TBR so I won't be disappointed by it. 😝
Thanks for the review. I love Kuang and this was on my read list. She's clearly prodigously intelligent, and shows it. Should I try it anyway?