R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
I liked it quite a bit, but to be clear, it's more Foucault's Pendulum than The Name of the Rose: a perfectly enjoyable outing for academics who want to turn their brains off for a bit, not anything resembling a classic. It's also, to my surprise, more Piranesi than Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: the plot machinations are few, it's mostly about the inner life of the main character.
[spoilers]
Of course, as soon as you can piece together that Alice is not going to die in Hell, you can be pretty certain Peter won't, either. And yes, it is stupidly obvious that they're in love with each other in the way that only grad students can muster--they both kinda know it to be a bad idea and it doesn't stop them. So it then stands to reason that Peter won't actually be dead at the end, and everything else kind of unspools from there. (It was also clear right away that Peter had no plans to sacrifice Alice, it didn't make sense in the arc of the story.)
I see the reason for the negative reviews: people don't want a happy ending. I also see the frustrations with the academic side of things, but I was once in a freshman philosophy class and fascinated by paradoxes--the topic of my first paper was the Sorites Paradox. So I'm clearly the audience for it, to grasp pretty much all of the references.
No comments:
Post a Comment