The book was making the rounds in the book communities and I picked it up while browsing Shinjuku Kinokuniya all that while having no idea of the actual topic or plot of the book. It took me forever to actually start reading it (something of a theme on this blog) but I couldn’t stop once I had started.

What is it about

What if translation was the force behind magic ? That’s the sidestep RF Kuang ask us to make before stepping into a very realistic, deeply researched mid-nineteen century Oxford and British empire.

We follow Robin Swift, a boy extracted from Canton by an Oxford professor interested in his proficiency in Cantonese and Mandarin, languages barely anyone in Oxford mastered, which gives the magic made with it extra potent.

The book itself is split in 3 different phases:

  1. Robin discovering life in England and starting his studies in Oxford
  2. His discovering the weight of the Empire, colonialism and the impact on his life, his peers’ and pretty much anyone who is not part of the bourgeois class or intellectual elite
  3. His rebellion against the system

There’s a lot of story and History intermingling in this book. Authors and plays. The Chinese Canton system. Luddism, the emergence of the factory system and the impact it had on workers. The (First) Opium War…

Having lived near Guangzhou and loving the whole city (much more than Tokyo) and having read a lot about Luddism (for exemple here) and communism/anarchism (for example here or here) in the past few months, it really felt like this book was published at the perfect time for me.

Final world

Read it.

The discussion on the book in the podcast Literary Liberation (~2 hours) was also very interesting.