Inside R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis Tour: Insights from the Author

Sarah Eng Bachrich
20 hours ago
2 min read

I had the privilege of attending R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis book tour in September. Rebecca F. Kuang is an award-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author known for books such as The Poppy War, Babel: An Arcane History, and Yellowface. She has studied at Cambridge, which is the setting of Katabasis, as well as Oxford, the setting of Babel, and is currently pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages at Yale.

Throughout the event, Kuang gave insights into her newest novel, Katabasis, a philosophy-

infused exploration of academic corruption and toxic mentorship. The premise is that two Cambridge postgraduate students venture to Hell to retrieve the soul of their deceased professor; Katabasis is an Ancient Greek term that refers to a hero’s descent to the underworld.

During the Q&A, Kuang answered questions from readers and from Michelle Cyca, a senior editor for The Narwhal and an accomplished literary critic. Some of Kuang’s insights sounded like they would resonate with or prove valuable to other writers, so I would like to share them here:

“I don’t like it when something is out there and it’s shiny and fascinating, and I don’t get to pull it apart. So I think all of my books are just a mental journey of chasing various fascinating things.”
“It’s dangerous to get to a point in your writing where you think the most interesting possible thoughts there could be are already occurring inside your head… I think it’s essential for writers to be very good at stepping outside of their narcissistic, solipsistic, subjective experiences and to, as Iris Murdoch puts it, ‘see the world as it is’.”
“Articulating the human experience should be hard, and it’s worth the struggle.”

Katabasis is a novel that explores the significance of “forgetting” as a means of letting go of trauma. It also pushes the idea that it is dangerous to deny one’s own suffering, as Kuang puts it: “Without spoiling too much of the book, one of the central themes is self-deception and delusion… The characters are operating within these cages of belief they’ve constructed around themselves, where they are so determined to be self-sufficient… that they have no framework for understanding what’s really happened to them.”

Overall, the event was a unique opportunity that provided not only insight into Kuang’s thematic intentions in her latest work but also a firsthand perspective on her broader approach to writing.

Content warnings for Katabasis by R.F. Kuang: