Thousands of people bought the “romantasy” fashion book because it was cute. An unpleasant surprise awaited them.
The consumerist desire that invades any area of our lives also contaminates our hobbies. We are no longer talking about your identity being determined by your style when it comes to dressing or the music you listen to; Now, not missing the latest literary viral phenomenon in #Booktok also forms that identity that is built through what we consume. And if not tell everyone who bought ‘Catabasis‘, the author’s new novel RF Kuangfor its colorful edition and supposed themes related to a whole legion of readers, only to end up with a disappointment that leads them to abandon it after a few pages. Be aware of the latest news and let your private library be ground zero of your literary diogenes, full of those decorated songs so instagrammableis a new aspect of consumerism. The essential thing is not to search and select a book that suits your taste or surprises you, but to look for that pompous edition in trend on Tiktok. With the rise and increase in the number of readers has given way to a community on social networks that consumes books, mostly from a specific genrehe romanticasyand that follows like a mantra literary fashion of the month. As we have mentioned, marketing strategies can confuse the public and in order to attract the largest number of buyers, sometimes blur categories and genres that should be delimited. The fever for colored songs As a regular reader, it is healthy to get out of that nebula and inform yourself well about the reading you are going to do or, on the contrary, go with an open mind and let yourself go when starting those new pages. Because if you don’t, you can come to ‘Catábasis’ looking for a romance within an academic-fantastic environment and end up with your head full of equations, formulas and philosophical postulates. If we dive in reviews from ‘Catábasis’, we will find an alleged romance Dark Academia with the clichés of rivals to lovers (rivals to lovers), forced proximity (forced proximity) or one bed (the famous trope of rom-coms where the protagonists are forced to share a single bed). This would lead us to place our perception of the work in an erroneous perspective. The novel has been sold as if it were addressed to the general public, when It’s niche. Doctoral thesis, graphic description. RF Kuang is not your typical romance writer. In his previous books such as the ‘Poppy War’ trilogy (named by Time as one of ‘The 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time‘) we find an epic fantasy of Asian inspiration; in ‘Babel’, a criticism of British imperialism; and in ‘Amarilla’, a satire on the publishing world. Perhaps it is from there that we have to establish the starting point of ‘Catábasis’. It may be that the public has been launched en masse to buy Kuang’s new novel infected by expectations, but just look at social networks to see that the outcome has been disappointing for not a few. The result of this phenomenon is curious because the criticisms of Kuang’s novel are based, for the most part, on issues that have little to do with its theme or the characters. It seemed that part of the book’s audience, directly, I didn’t know what he was facing. On this occasion the #Booktok community was a victim of “what goes” and an elegant and striking edition: but, dear readers, not everything has to be romance and romanticasy. This lucrative sales strategy that consists of labeling all the literary novelties under clichés that are associated with romance to attract more attention ends up being a double-edged sword for books like Kuang’s. hell is a campus In this new novel we find the story of two Cambridge doctoral students who, after the death of their thesis advisor, decide to travel to hell to look for him and obtain a letter of recommendation that will determine their professional future. And yes, we can accept the label Dark Academia since it has several of its elements, just as we also find a romance that floods and emerges throughout the story; but ‘Catabasis’ (a Greek term that refers to the descent to hell and subsequent exit from it), is about something else. RF Kuang, in essence, uses the underworld as MacGuffin to create a critique and a satire of the academic world through a raw and realistic vision. Sounds good, maybe not so good. The author shoots us with scenes in offices that cause more chills than Dante’s own inferno; while talking about toxic rivalries, directors who abuse their power, gender inequality and academic obsession with knowledge. And, despite fantasy and a system of magic based on logic and paradox, these unreal situations trigger a conversation and social criticism about the academy. While the protagonists Alice and Peter wander through the “eight circles of hell” we are immersed in numerous philosophical and mathematical elements. Dante, Piranesi, the myth of Orpheus or the scrolls of Hecate are part of the daily narrative. The book is full of mathematical theories, academic references, and terms that will make you stop several times to do a Google search. The fact that for some doctoral students hell is, literally, their own university, already makes us suspect that we are not facing a rivals to lovers to use; not even in the face of academic criticism of Ali Hazelwood style. ‘Catabasis’ is dense and requires active reading; In fact, we can say that it is an essay disguised as a novel that sometimes sacrifices the rhythm of the plot or its development in favor of the style and ideas it wants to convey. With an acidic, witty and harsh tone, Kuang uses Alice as the epicenter of the narrative. A character who is not designed to make you like him, but to embody the loss of health and identity caused by the pressure of his tutor and the academic environment. The message that we can filter is quite clear: Sartre said that … Read more
