Margaux

So this might be the hardest book for me to rate or to review in any intelligible manner. At some point, I was ready to give it a one-star rating not because of the despicable subject matter but because of how hard it made me work. (I found the French passages quite tedious in that they trip me up in my reading, as I constantly had to look up unfamiliar phrases on trusty old google.)

Despite my annoyance with the over-the-top use of French, I admit that I was really drawn in by the beautiful, BEAUTIFUL writing. As many a reviewer have said before, Nabokov really could write the fuck out of a sentence. And those delightfully witty word-plays! (Which I probably understood only half of the time.)

Notwithstanding the very murky morals of this novel, I think it was successful in what it set out to do–that is, describe an obsessive love (lust?) through the eyes of a very unreliable yet very eloquent narrator who obscures and obfuscates his more deplorable acts through hazy, dreamy language. And yet it manages to be more than the sum of its parts (in the way great works of fiction are). For although it may be regarded as a story of forbidden erotic desires, Lolita is also a tale of contrasts between the young and the old , about the crumbling European world and America, the unsettling subject matter and the enthralling beauty of language. After all, every good book contends with problems greater than the mere facts of its narrative.

Also, knowing what happened at the end, it is quite interesting to see how various things have been foreshadowed throughout the book. This is definitely worthy of a closer reading and one that I will revisit in the future just to see how my reading of the text has evolved.

**Upgrading this to a 4-star rating because I can't get it out of my mind and because it is definitely NOT a mediocre book.

I'm realizing Junji Ito's work might not be my cup of tea. It's a shame though, since I borrowed three of his books from the library!

This is the first RF Kuang book I've read, so I came into this without too many expectations aside from the dark academia tag and the hefty reading list attached. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I really enjoyed the writing style, which could veer on the pedantic (and would probably come off as pretentious to some).

Having recently left grad school myself, the book's portrayal of academic burnout felt immediately recognizable. Also, reading this closely after Vita Nostra, I was struck by how both works depict knowledge as something you're expected to earn through exhaustion, isolation and self-erasure. Kuang shows this through the everyday grind of scholarship, while Vita Nostra pushes it to a far more surreal and punishing extreme (Btw, if you liked Katabasis, I think you'd also enjoy Vita Nostra).

The book does hammer in a lot of the points it's trying to make, especially with the injustices common in academic institutions (the petty rivalries, the clamor for funding and limited opportunities, and just the general systemic abuses). I mean, Hell is literally a campus. That being said, I did appreciate how exploitation and the abuses stemming from power imbalances were handled. It didn't feel cheap or emotionally manipulative. I think where the book falters is in characterization. Despite having a morally complex protagonist with very confusing and contradictory motivations, many of the characters feel more like vessels for exploring ideas about academia than fully realized people with their own inner lives.

As for the reading list, familiarity with Dante's Inferno would certainly help, but I don't think it's strictly necessary to enjoy the reading experience. Some complementary readings I'd actually recommend are Alice in Wonderland, the first few chapters of Gödel, Escher, Bach (I've never read past Chapter 4 myself), and The Myth of Sisyphus. The connection to Camus is only thematic, but it's one I particularly enjoyed and found worth thinking about after slogging through the last few sections.

Yes, the ending drags a little, but the intellectual journey makes it worth pushing through. There's something cathartic about watching the protagonist grapple with big existential questions as she descends through the courts of hell: What does it mean to truly understand something? Is knowledge worth the cost we pay for it? What keeps us going in the face of suffering? And, in the end, what makes a life worth living? You probably won't find the answers here, but Kuang doesn't pretend to offer easy solutions to questions that have haunted philosophers for millennia. Instead, she offers something perhaps more valuable: a honest exploration of why we keep asking these questions despite knowing they might be unanswerable.

Sonechka - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Queen of Spades - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Zurich - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Beast - ⭐️⭐️
Angel - ⭐️
The Orlov-Sokolovs - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Dauntless Women of the Russian Steppe - ⭐️⭐️

Rivera Garza's prose is gorgeous, atmospheric, dreamy, and unsettling in all the right ways. For the first half of the book, I was completely on board with the weirdness. I kept thinking things would click into place eventually, or at least that I'd understand more as I went on.

The final chapters (really more like vignettes) lost me completely. They're so abstract that I couldn't piece together what was happening or what it all meant. I finished feeling impressed by the writing but also kind of frustrated that it never came together (at least for me). Either something's lost in translation or I just don't understand the symbolism the narrative is trying to convey.

Either way, it's worth reading if you love lyrical prose and don't need a clear plot. If you want things to make sense by the end, maybe skip this one. Otherwise, try to read it in the original Spanish if you're able.