Babel

by R.F. Kuang

If you find any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself this is a work of fiction.

‘To accept without thinking.’

Family names were not things to be dropped and replaced at whim, he thought. They marked lineage; they marked belonging.

‘The only families who keep theirs do it because they have titles to hold on to, and you certainly haven’t got any.

Robin Swift

He could've been Taylor

One did not spite one’s saviours.

He buried his past life, not because it was so terrible but because abandoning it was the only way to survive.

London was drab and grey; was exploding in colour; was a raucous din, bursting with life; was eerily quiet, haunted by ghosts and graveyards.

a city of contradictions and multitudes, as was any city that acted as a mouth to the world.

Words and phrases you think are carved into your bones can disappear in no time.’

But he was forgetting. That terrified him.

there were some truths that could not be uttered, that life as normal was only possible if they were never acknowledged.

A lie was not a lie if it was never uttered; questions that were never asked did not need answers. They would both remain perfectly content to linger in the liminal, endless space between truth and denial.

someone named Charles Dickens, who was very funny but seemed to hate very much anyone who was not white.

He learned that the practice of serving food in successive courses was adopted from the French, and that the reason it was not yet a universal norm was a lingering resentment over that little man Napoleon.

he reframed those memories in the context of the novel,

to Professor Lovell and his friends in their remote walled estates, the epidemic was something to mention in passing, wince about in sympathy, and quickly forget.

‘He’d like to know if you can see.’ ‘I – what?’ ‘If you can see?’

‘With your eyes like that – can you see everything? Or is it only in little slits?’

This was how things had always been between them: conversations unfinished, words best left unsaid.

immediately, visibly other.

If they’re going to tell stories about you, use it to your advantage.

But Ramy, who had no choice but to stand out, had decided he might as well dazzle.

books are meant to be touched, otherwise they’re useless,

They were men at Oxford; they were not Oxford men.

‘I suppose we decided to be girls because being boys seems to require giving up half your brain cells.’

Travel sounds fun until you realize what you really want is to stay at home with a cup of tea and a stack of books by a warm fire.’

‘Your languages determine how interesting you are.

This was a pattern, Robin noticed – the initial authors all tended to be white British men rather than native speakers of those languages.

Real life is messy, scary, and uncertain.’

‘That servile path thou nobly dost decline,’ Ramy recited, ‘of tracing word by word, and line by line.’ ‘Those are the laboured births of slavish brains, not the effect of poetry, but pains,’

They needed each other because they had no one else.

It all started to feel easy, this simple act of opening a door twice; so easy that by the seventh theft, he had convinced himself he was not doing anything dangerous at all.

It’s violent work that sustains the fantasy.’

Babel represented more than material comforts. Babel was the reason he belonged in England, why he was not begging on the streets of Canton. Babel was the only place where his talents mattered. Babel was security. And perhaps all that was morally compromised, yes – but was it so wrong to want to survive?

You don’t know how much of her behaviour is dictated by fear.’

‘Which seems right to you? Do we try our hardest, as translators, to render ourselves invisible? Or do we remind our reader that what they are reading was not written in their native language?’

‘Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?’

‘Words have no meaning unless there is someone present who can understand them.

‘Languages aren’t just made of words. They’re modes of looking at the world. They’re the keys to civilization. And that’s knowledge worth killing for.’

So the history of the word does not describe just a change in language, but a change in an entire social order.’

Older students had no intention of bullying newer ones. They simply didn’t have the time.

They became what they’d aspired to be since their first year – aloof, brilliant, and fatigued to the bone. They were miserable. They slept and ate too little, read too much, and fell completely out of touch with matters outside Oxford or Babel. They ignored the life of the world; they lived only the life of the mind. They adored it.

‘It’s us. Frozen in time, captured in a moment we’ll never get back as long as we live. It’s wonderful.’

Photography, he thought, was also a kind of translation,

The Chinese don’t need anything we’re selling; they can produce everything they want on their own.

History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.’

This was where he needed to be – dull enough not to mind the pain, alert enough to sew himself together.

They used to find solace in their solidarity, but now they saw each other only as reminders of their own misery.

it’s good, in our situation, to be needed.’