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yars_reading_corner 's review for:
Babel
by R.F. Kuang
It took me almost one year to come up with a worthy review for this absolute masterpiece, so here it goes.
Babel is based on the story of the tower of babylon (mentioned a few times in the book), and is full of beautiful metaphors and symbolisms that one need only to open their eyes to connect the dots, it was definitely heavy and difficult to read, not in the sense of the prestigious language used to write it or the plot, no, it was more related to the topics of the brutality of colonialism disguised as “educating the more inferior peoples of the world” and how far colonizers will go to feed their neverending greed, and how the people colonized will be indoctrinated into agreeing with them and thinking of themselves as lesser humans.
First and foremost this book is rather slow until about halfway through, with a lot of random etymologies and flashbacks being thrown in the reader’s face, and it’s understandable since it’s a book about the translation industry in the 1800s, but the second half somehow flies and so much happens that I re-read some important parts to wrap my head around what happened, the characters aren’t cute and fuzzy or bullies and drug-abusing trashbags of society, but they were a bunch of kids plucked from their homelands because they could “dream” in their native language and the English needed their magical powers to fuel their cuvilization after Latin and Greek were drained and not so useful anymore.
I loved the themes, as heavy as they were, mainly because it was a gloomier and darker, more disgusting side of academia that, although fiction, has many roots in reality and eversince I read this book I keep thinking about it and remembering things from it, and I’ve developped an odd sense of justice to anti-colonization, I can see it everywhere nowadays, with the rise of private English schools, children’s entertainment only available in English first then dubbed to others later on, the cultural amnesia that’s happening in the world where people no longer care about nor respect their culture (from language to food to clothing), I’m affliced with knowledge I was blind to before and I can no longer close my eyes not to see.
Babel is based on the story of the tower of babylon (mentioned a few times in the book), and is full of beautiful metaphors and symbolisms that one need only to open their eyes to connect the dots, it was definitely heavy and difficult to read, not in the sense of the prestigious language used to write it or the plot, no, it was more related to the topics of the brutality of colonialism disguised as “educating the more inferior peoples of the world” and how far colonizers will go to feed their neverending greed, and how the people colonized will be indoctrinated into agreeing with them and thinking of themselves as lesser humans.
First and foremost this book is rather slow until about halfway through, with a lot of random etymologies and flashbacks being thrown in the reader’s face, and it’s understandable since it’s a book about the translation industry in the 1800s, but the second half somehow flies and so much happens that I re-read some important parts to wrap my head around what happened, the characters aren’t cute and fuzzy or bullies and drug-abusing trashbags of society, but they were a bunch of kids plucked from their homelands because they could “dream” in their native language and the English needed their magical powers to fuel their cuvilization after Latin and Greek were drained and not so useful anymore.
I loved the themes, as heavy as they were, mainly because it was a gloomier and darker, more disgusting side of academia that, although fiction, has many roots in reality and eversince I read this book I keep thinking about it and remembering things from it, and I’ve developped an odd sense of justice to anti-colonization, I can see it everywhere nowadays, with the rise of private English schools, children’s entertainment only available in English first then dubbed to others later on, the cultural amnesia that’s happening in the world where people no longer care about nor respect their culture (from language to food to clothing), I’m affliced with knowledge I was blind to before and I can no longer close my eyes not to see.