A review by limabeans
Babel by R.F. Kuang

challenging informative tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

To start off, this story was phenomenally written and was able to beautifully portray heavy and uncomfortable topics in an intriguing way. 

R.F. Kuang’s true dedication to this lengthy amount of research definitely shows in the novel. She’s able to accurately and appropriately portray loads of translations (especially with the match pairs), literature, and other cultural work. The blurbs at the bottom of pages were a very helpful touch.

This book is of course more than just the loss of concepts between translation; I would even argue that it’s not even as important compared to what else Babel contains. Kuang dives into imperialism, colonialism, identity confusion, one’s own roots, and so much more. And it ties the role of academia into all of this, which is tremendously hard to do.  

My favorite aspect was probably how Kuang portrayed Robin’s struggle of personal fortunes versus greater cause.
We can see this with Letty who doesn’t understand why the other three in their cohort would throw away all they have for something that would not directly affect them. I think this was done so well because we are all just human at the end of the day— originally Robin didn’t want to throw away his perfect, academic life for the Hermes society despite knowing how fucked up it was to have what he had and how we had gotten their from Richard.

I also believe it’s extremely hard to write a character change in this context with as harsh as issues that Robin had. It was masterfully done. (not that Victoire and Ramy weren’t facing this [duh], but they didn’t have nearly the same amount of internal conflict leading to their change as Robin did.)

There were some flaws. The introduction of the magic with the silver working math pairs was a fascinating concept yet it was barely touched upon. Not that a fantasy book has to be filled with magic, but more use of this honestly innovative idea would have been nice.

I also wish more little things. Like much more time was spent in Canton or revolved more around it. That the cohort characters weren’t relatively flat for half the story. But not much to complain about. 

It is hard because there’s so much hype around Babel. I do not find this story to have ‘unaware, groundbreaking’ concepts as I have been told or have seen from outside sources. (I try not to let media get in the way of biasing my own opinion though.) But it was definitely a book I will continue to think about and reflect upon; it truly was an excellent read and I’m very impressed by Kuang’s research and writing.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anybody. Seriously, I think everybody should read this book at some point regardless of genre or writing preferences. 
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