TL;DR - Neat magic system (bad execution!), poor storytelling, predictable ending, glorification of violence, and strong abuse of authoritative academTL;DR - Neat magic system (bad execution!), poor storytelling, predictable ending, glorification of violence, and strong abuse of authoritative academic voice to push / lend false credibility to author's pet social agenda.
Some thoughts:
- Inconsistent Application of the Magic System: This book has a neat magic system based on finding "etymological pairs", where the 1st word is either a derivative, entymon, or cognate of a 2nd word. These words are then etched into a silver bar, and any difference in meaning that cannot be fully translated between the words in a pair gets manifested into reality by the silver. This magic system has a lot of potential and definitely allows the author to showcase her language background. And I love languages and linguistics! Being a language geek myself, I personally enjoyed this quite a bit as it allowed me to practice some of my former training in stuff like Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic. Unfortunately, this system isn't consistently applied in the book when working with the "Romance" languages vs. working with Mandarin and such. Additionally, most of the silver language magic in here could essentially be replaced with the words "technology" or "industrialization" and this book would have read the same. Overall, I wish she would have been consistent and fleshed out this magic concept in more depth, rather than solely using it as a prop to push the view of "translation = violence". With that said, these are literary issues that in some ways could be considered minor.
- Too Predictable: If the title of the book didn't already allude to the ending, the moment the silver match-pair paradox was mentioned it pretty much mapped out the exact ending of the book for me. The story ending was predictable and I wish it wasn't so! Characters were little more than paper-thin puppets whose interactions you can predict based on where they are on the hypothetical minority/victim spectrum. If anything, this means the book was simplistic.
- Romanticization of Violence: While it does somewhat give an indirect disclaimer within the title of the book, I think this author glorifies The Violent Path too much. "Good characters" die, and those with non-violent solutions or tendencies are treated as insignificant. Also, there were non-violent ways to solve the silver dependency issue (namely making a portion of the silver used "paradoxical" and then melting down the silver and recombining it with the rest of the silver in distribution to make it useless), but apparently this was never thought of as an option by the characters. The story mostly fell into the trope of non-violence being conflated with idealism, while embracing violence was seen as being realistic and practical, of actually getting things done. Overall, I got the strong feeling the writer was working out her own unresolved anger issues from past experiences through this book.
- Abuse of Academic Voice: The author uses foot/endnotes throughout the book (I read a digital copy) to either give further explanation of a particular etymology, deliver extra fictional content in parallel, or provide actual historical content from her perspective as a real-life academic. While the former two cases I am okay with, I think the author abuses the latter a bit too much to push forth her social justice agenda. And while I agree with her on many of these issues, I think she cherry-picks her examples and doesn't give the full context of the situation.
More importantly, as a fellow academic trained in both philosophy and mathematics (in particular and of relevance, that of logic and the philosophy of language and mathematics), I find it rather alarming that she states seeming "facts" with such an authoritative tone even though they might not be such at all. For example, when talking about how math is culture and language-dependent, I think she makes the mistake of conflating mathematics with the notation that represents mathematics, the classic *reference vs. referent* problem. I don't necessarily find an issue with this, as many people make this mistake, but she writes in her endnotes such things as "This is true. Mathematics is not divorced from culture…". This "this is true" phrase is not an isolated incident and it litters her story in many ways, shapes, and forms, allowing her to call upon her academic background and lend false credibility to statements and propositions that are very much still up for debate and for which there is no simple True or False, Black or White, Good or Evil dichotomies as she makes it seem. While I can see through this, I am afraid the average reader might not have enough knowledge or background to see how Kuang so easily warps truths and applies rhetoric to chop off any nuance that doesn't fit her particular social agenda. Unfortunately, I think she takes the opposing worldview of mine where an academic is also necessarily a political agent that needs to engage in rhetoric and activism, whereas I think we as academics should strive to be as neutral of a voice as we can, else we might endanger and warp our own ability to see the truth. Through this forceful, heavy-handed, and one-sided commentary, Kuang does not allow the reader the room to form their own opinions, which strikes me as someone who is writing for the sake of praising themselves in their own fan-fiction-like echo chamber.
- Too much Twitter-styled Activism: Like many authors, I think R.F. Kuang writes herself and her former experiences into her characters and story environment. While it might be a stretch of mine to hypothesize that her past experiences on debate teams, her academic experience at Oxford, and her particular cultural background "as an outsider" might have contributed to the general "chip on her shoulder" vibe I get from her writing, I nevertheless think she is too biased and simplistic in the way she shapes her narratives. Most of the dialogue consisted of the author telling you what to believe and what is right, with the footnotes reiterating the fact that this is The One True Way to view the world. For example, in Babel, pretty much all white people are evil, guilty, or confused in some way (I, myself, am both white + asian like the main character in this story). She paints a story where the more ethnically exotic you are, the more morally right you are. Characters were mostly constructed as cardboard racial stereotypes that acted as strawmen for easy target practice. While I think this is not necessarily a problem since an author can write a fictional story in however way they want (even if they are seemingly biased like Kuang), I do think it becomes a problem when she mixes in her meta-narrative commentary and brings in real-life historical information. This debate tactic gives her the ability to shape the narrative and story to fit her argument, allowing her to set the emotional stage with fictional examples, and then follow it up with a thin slice of real-world history that only supports this particular context. While used very effectively (in a negative way) on various social media platforms, it is problematic in that it stirs up emotions and distorts the way one views the real world. It basically shows a tremendous lack of nuance on her part, and I am disappointed that an academic like her engages in Twitter-style social activist actions like this. Be careful of brain worms!
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Overall, I give it 2/5 stars. I was really looking forward to this book about language and magic, but unfortunately was incredibly disappointed in its execution. The ideas had so much potential....more
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