Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

Other books by the author:
The Poppy War
Babel
Yellowface

I wanted to read Katabasis by R.F. Kuang as my first book for the year because so many people loved it and I loved Babel and this was another dark academia book, so I was all in. 

Alice's graduate school advisor in Magick has died and she really needs him to not be dead. She's never going to graduate and get a job without him. So she needs to go to Hell and get him. But just as she's completing the pentagram that's going to take her there, her nemesis and advisor's other student, Peter shows up. They end up going to Hell together. 

I'm not giving any spoilers. This is literally on the second page of the book.

Since Professor Grimes's demise she had spent her every waking moment reading every monograph, paper, and shred of correspondence she could find on the journey to Hell and back. At least a dozen scholars had made the trip and lived to credibly tell the tale, but very few in the past century. All existing source were unreliable to different degrees and devilishly tricky to translate besides. (page 2) 

Alice and Peter wander around Hell trying to find Grimes and having adventures. 

Look, this book is fine. But do you all know my stance on religion and talk of the afterlife? Well, my stance is that it's all quite boring. The setting and magic here was not as interesting as that of Babel and I was somewhat disappointed. That being said, I did spend an entire snowy Saturday afternoon curled up reading it, so it was readable and there were lots of smart observations that made me laugh. 3.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

She'd done the White Mountains. How much worse could Hell be? (page 58)

I don't know why this made me laugh as much as it did. Suck it, New Hampshire.

Everyone knew that the nicer a library was, the better the work you did within it. (page 83)

I mean, this is undoubtedly true, right?

Fortunately graduate school had prepared her for this, the constant managing of despair. Everything was always falling apart; nothing in lab went right; you couldn't afford groceries, your cottage had a rat problem, all your instructors hated you, you were always one step away from flushing all your life's work down the toilet. You shoved it to the side of your mind and went to sleep and deferred it all to tomorrow when your brain again functioned well enough to pretend. (page 116-117)

Grad school sucked, yo.

Grimes's generation were at least war magicians; they had pushed the filed forward by leaps and bounds in its practical applications. But Alice and Peter's cohort quibbled over philosophical details. They made flash gadgets for toy companies. The best among them sought residencies in Vegas; the worst among them became consultants. No doubt, magic was on the decline. (page 161)

LOLOLOL. Sob. Sob. 

Did Canada even have universities, or did everyone just ski and eat maple syrup and run away from bears all year round? (page 205)

Again, this made me laugh harder than it should have. Suck it, Canada. 

It was, after all, a golden rule in academia that the more popular one was among the masses, the less valuable one's research had to be. (page 228)

YOU GUYS. There is no record on this blog of the shitty work done by Robert Putnam, who put out a book that was a bestseller with a terrible thesis and this pie chart at the end that said "guesstimate" as if it were there as a placeholder that no one bothered checking. There was some interesting use of data in the book, but that doesn't mean it wasn't also terrible scholarship. ANYWAY. We actually do talk about social capital in our house a lot and I think about Robert Putnam way too often. Also, he spilled red wine on my friend Angie and never apologized. 

Why wouldn't everyone strip away the parts of their selves that caused them pain? She'd like to learn that trick, she thought. If she could sift through that mess in her head, pull out the files that kept torturing her, and burn them. Every small humiliation, every shred of guilt - if only she could unclutter her mind so that all that was left was the elements she wanted to keep: the burning core, the hunger for knowledge, the skills to gain it. You could achieve so much without the burdens of personhood. Who wouldn't wash away the rest? (page 271-272)

I mean, when you put it like that? 

He loved numbers because they behaved the way the were supposed to, because the rules never changed. The square root of sixty-four never ceased to be eight. (page 338)

This, friends, is why I minored in math. I am a social scientist at heart, but people are complicated. There were no clear cut answers when I took my political science and history classes, but when I took a calculus class and it asked me to integrate an expression? I could circle the answer. How satisisfying. 

Things I looked up:

katabasis (title) - (in classical mythology and literature) a descent into the underworld

votary (page 1 - literally the seventh word of the book) - a person, such as a monk or nun, who has made vows of dedication to religious service or a devoted follower or advocate of something

pidge (page 56 for the first time) - this is what I would call a pigeonhole as an American

Nastaliq (page 152) - one of the main calligraphic hands used to write Arabic script and is used for some Indo-Iranian languages, predominantly Classical Persian, Urdu, Kashmiri and Punjabi

Linear B (page 152) - a syllabic script that was used for writing in Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of the Greek language; it predates the modern Greek alphabet by several centuries

tripos (page 170) - the final honors examination for a BA degree at Cambridge University

Chateau Laurier (page 205) - a 660,000-square-foot hotel with 429 guest rooms in the downtown core of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada - You guys, I have a confession to make. I've been there.

By Michel Rathwell - https://www.flickr.com/photos/digimages1/36191173260/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=124536665

Nuerath (page 223)  - This is the name of a boat in the book. I presume it's named after Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath who was an Austrian-born philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. He was also the inventor of the ISOTYPE method of pictorial statistics and an innovator in museum practice. I dug no deeper. Pictorial statistics sounds dire. 

Festschrift (page 230) - a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during their lifetime. It generally takes the form of an edited volume, containing contributions from the honoree's colleagues, former pupils, and friends. I have never heard this term in my entire life as an academic. Am I true academic? Probably not. I don't have a preferred brand of chalk.

Boltzman brain (page 269) - a thought experiment that suggests that it is probably more likely for a brain to spontaneously form, complete with a memory of having existed in our universe, rather than for the entire universe to come about in the manner cosmologists think it actually did. The idea is named after the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), who published a hypothesis in 1896, prior to the Big Bang theory, that tried to account for the fact that the universe is not as chaotic as the budding field of thermodynamics seemed to predict. Again, I did not dig any deeper than this because it became obvious that I am not smart enough for this. 

Axiothea (page 303) - Could be one of two women. Axiotheo of Paphos was a 4th-century BCE Cyprian queen. Axiothea of Phlius was a member of the Platonic Academy in the 4th century BCE. I'm leaning towards Axiothea of Philius based on context clues. 

Colossi of Memnon (page 326) - two large stone statues of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III, which stand at the front of the ruined Mortuary Temple of Amenhotep III, the largest temple in the Theban Necropolis. They have stood since 1350 BC

By MusikAnimal - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41258037

rhizomatic (page 345) - (botany) Resembling or related to a rhizome. (philosophy) Employing rhizomes; not arborescent; spreading without a traditional hierarchy

mathematician Irene Fulmencio (page 349) - I'm pretty sure this is a fictional character, but I'd be happy to be corrected. 

Parmenides (page 408) - Parmenides of Elea (late sixth or early fifth century BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Elea in Magna Graecia

bident (page 515) - a two-pronged implement resembling a pitchfork. In Renaissance art, the bident is associated with the god Pluto. I felt a little silly after looking this up - it's a bident, not a trident. Sheesh. 

Hat mention (why hats?):

They asked if he wore cowboy hats. (page 375)

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Have you read R.F. Kuang? Would you go to Hell to bring your advisor back?