Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

5 stars.

and this review contains spoilers!

Alice and Peter traveled to Hell to rescue their very dead, very cruel academic advisor, Professor Jacob Grimes, and he perfectly summarizes this book:

Stop barreling toward the end point, start lingering in the process. There’s so much that will reveal itself to you if you just pause and have a look around. Smell the roses!

the plot isn't all too complex, but really, going through Hell does teach you a lot.

i have to applaud the authors immaculate encapsulation of the nuances of all characters and their relationships with each other. as a student with her last semester in academia, it felt like being seen. the post grads interactions, conversations, and dynamics with each other and their advisors was all very relatable.

and I found her interpretation of Hell and the Courts very clever. Hell is a campus and to get out of it, you have to write a dissertation on your sins. the hellish part? there's no deadline. no feedback. no official rejection. write for an eternity and wait for an eternity. And oh, ambitious souls in Hell have made a business of coaching classes out of this system too. damn witty.

all the courts are inspired by Dante's Inferno, and Kuang's interpretation of them was quite thought provoking.

Court 1: Pride

Aristotle distinguished between proper and improper pride. The worthy man could justly boast of his accomplishments, so long as he had actually done them.

Court 2: Desire. this is such a good way to describe addiction.

weakness of the will, rather than active malice toward others

it made you the cause of your own suffering.

You succumbed, you indulged, and you were never able to leave.

it's been months since i've read this book, and this still stays with me. succumbing to scrolling, binge eating, and procrastinating—all of it—weakness of will is all it is, isn't it?

love me a good book with good quotes.

the other courts weren't explored as in depth but that's alright. by then, the story had shifted its focus to Alice and Peter.

Kuang has written them both extra-ordinarily well. Alice who is determined, focused, and yet in her femininity wishes to be desired and pursued. she's attracted to the mind and repulsed to the bodily desires of sex. she watched the mind she fell in love with, the intellect she admired greatly, to be reduced simply to the carnal & thoughtless desire of lust — it took away all the appeal of that person. with the depth and care Alice has been written, i could see that Kuang truly understood her.

and then Peter on the other hand is inspiring. the entire book he was described as a genius who could do stuff effortlessly but then we get to his perspective and find out he actually does put in the effort? very nice. and then, in chronic illness. that man is unhinged i tell you. and very brave. he terrifies me. having such a strong mindset despite being pitied and excused of responsibilities his whole lifetime. he's so determined to pursuing difficult things when in fact it would've been okay for him to not do that? inspires me. just because the body is weak, the mind can still work. it can still think. it can still do great things

side note: learned some new economic terms too

You know,” Peter said, “the sunk cost fallacy is one of the most common failures of everyday logic.”

also the concept of Magick being based on paradoxes and logic was interesting and gave food for thought. i did not expect it to teach me about logic and paradoxes. i do call some bs on it, like the part of believing a paradox is true is the key to perform Magick; if you can convince yourself that your paradox bends the laws of nature and if you can write a convincing proof for it, then the Magick is gonna happen

eh.

but. it still taught me about classical logic. or rather reminded me of it. the law of non-contradiction and the law of excluded middle. the first one states that P & ~P cannot be true at once. and the second states that either P is True or False. cannot be in between.

but. but

classical logic especially falls apart as a language applied to human relationships, which are messy and complicated and often in that excluded middle, that space where no one is right or no one is wrong and things are neither true nor false

nothing is black and white. its gray for everyone. its in the excluded middle for everyone. some just deal with that better than the others. the logical part of my brain struggles so much to understand that P and ~P are indeed, true at once.

and i have to give it to the authors observational skills. she's perfectly captured the nuances in the personality of different characters. she likely picked it off from her own encounters, like the scene where Alice notes that Grimes is a bit scattered considering he's asked the same question to her 3 times already in the last few months?

I was like. yes. that's the word. scattered. i can describe so many people with that one word now xDD

there's also Alice's drive....that i wish i had.

the spark that longed to be productive

oh gawd. mine only wants to eat and sleep. but Alice has a good reply to that

life is an activity that's got to be sustained. you have to fight for it. otherwise its no life at all

and Gradus listened to that, didn't he? on one hand, there were shades stuck in a rat race in Dis. on the other, there were those who had chosen indecision and inactivity, simply awaiting the end of time in Rebel Citadel. but Gradus? he fought for knowledge and then for a budding friendship. and he got his reward.

there was an also very interesting concept in this book. the universe being an open system, and not a closed one with set rules and deterministic philosophy, is a new way to look at things too, no?

universe is an open system. there's room for exceptions to occur. everything is not set in stone. there are odds and you have to believe in them. why, that is how hope prevails.

that's all. the journey was everything in the book and i enjoyed it. a thought-provoking fun read. the downside however is that the book wasn't as gripping as you'd expect it to be and the narrative kept breaking. traveling to hell should have been high stakes, but it took me 15 days to get through this.

blue turtle ambiance music for this read: