While exploring deeply significant issues in its own right, this new story nevertheless transforms the novel into the very thing its earlier half criticizes. Babel is, at least initially, a book about the nature of language, the politics of translation, and the fraught history that exists between colonialism and academia.Īnd yet at the same time, while I honestly think that the first half of Babel represents one of the most fascinating stories I've ever read, the novel's ending veers sharply away from these subjects, abandoning the themes which have already emerged from the story naturally, and instead twisting the book into a painfully didactic political and historical allegory. The majority of Babel's narrative represents an innovative work of alternate history, with the novel's fantasy elements merging so seamlessly with the novel's carefully researched real-world setting that both transform into a natural expression of the story's themes. Kuang's 2022 historical fantasy novel Babel (whose complete title reads: " Babel or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translator's Revolution") was a book which I came to be intensely conflicted about.
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