Katabasis

This book left me PISSED. First of all, my expectations were so high that I knew the fall would be huge if this book was short of perfection. That's not fair to Ms. Kuang. I love dark academia, I love R.F. Kuang's brain. It's astonishing to me that someone so young can have this much knowledge about so many different subjects. My two braincells can't even begin to comprehend the amount of studying it takes to write something like Katabasis or Babel. She's a great writer - she knows that, everyone knows that. That being said, I expected Katabasis to sing to me in a way that it didn't. How could she do this to me - she made hell boring. This book felt like the last season of Game of Thrones, when everything suddenly happens really fast after seven seasons of being so slow. Remember when it took ages to get from one point to the next, and then in the last season every road was suddenly shorter and every destination around the corner? Yeah, that’s Katabasis for me. This is about a journey to hell. I expected adventure and action and that Babel feeling that left me on edge all the time. This book simply didn’t give me that for the first 300 pages. Sure, it’s well-written - Kuang knows what she’s writing about - but it’s like she’s trying to prove that instead of delivering the adventure she’s been promoting for ages. It’s way more about character depth than anything else. She lost me with all the reminiscences; whenever the plot got interesting, she suddenly stopped to contextualize and it got soooo boring - except for Peter. Thank god for Peter Murdoch. You’ll forever be the star of this book. I pushed through because it’s Katabasis, and it’s hell we’re talking about, and at some point something’s got to happen. And it sure did and it’s the whole reason I’m giving this book 4 stars. On the last 200 pages she got me. She gave me the hell I wanted and deserved - so intricate, so sharp, with an ending so well constructed it almost made me forgive the slog of the beginning. Katabasis is not the thrill ride I was waiting for - it’s slower, denser, more introspective. But when it finally delivers, it delivers hard. If you can survive the long descent, the ending makes the journey worth it.