Rebecca Kuang, with 6 bestsellers before 30 years old, comes back to the fantastic genre with “Katabasis”

“As a child, I was told that when you die, you go to paradise and paradise is where you eat cake all day and you spend time with your friends,” said the 29 -year -old Chinese novelist, who was raised Christian and publishes RF Kuang. “And that really, really disturbed me because I think that the monotony of this eternal existence was really frightening. It seems that there could be no participations, nothing would be precious because there would be no conception of time.”

Ruminant on what is happening after your death inspired Kuang’s last book, “Katabasis”. After the brilliant satire of publishing and social media in “Yellowface” of 2023, Kuang returns to the fantastic genre.

Unlike “Babel” of 2022, “Katabasis”, Tuesday, is a dark but fun take -off in the academic world – an establishment that the current graduate student of the University of Yale knows well. This is the speech of Booktok and the most anticipated books of publications, and it is already planned to transform it into an Amazon series led by the showrunner “The Walking Dead” Angela Kang. Kuang will serve as a producer.

Kuang, however, tries not to leave the pressure and the high expectations to her.

“I think I always become a little nervous before a book comes out, but I think it’s just not good to dwell on it because it is not at all productive,” said Kuang, who already had several chapters of “Katabasis” written when “Yellowface” was out.

The protagonist of history, Cambridge Analytic Magic Doctoral student Alice, is obsessed with the obtaining of this healthiest academic graser: a letter of recommendation from the president of the department. After having died unexpectedly, Alice decides to use a pentagram to enter the purgatory and find him. Only a handful of researchers survived the trip. The classmate and Frenemy Peter invites himself.

Like the nine circles of the hell of “Dante’s Inferno”, the readers are swept away in the “eight courses in hell”. As an architect of hell, Kuang throws the landscape in detail, from large dunes to skeletal animals made only of bone maintained with chalk.

Kuang looked for different beliefs about hell and wrote “Katabasis” while continuing his continuation of his doctorate in Languages ​​and Literature of East in Yale. She recently spoke with the Associated Press of the “magic” of the design of her own version of hell and the targeting of universities by the Trump administration, among other subjects. The interview was published for more clarity and conciseness.

AP: You must have had a lot of fun as to conceive of each court of hell. The court of pride (a library) was many people who had been very condescending or pretentious. Was it your own playful revenge for perhaps sometimes boring – whether it is well intentioned – colleagues from the academic world?

Kuang: Of course, me – we had a lot of fun. I bounced back on my husband because he is also in the academic world. We thought: “Oh, what are all the boring little things that people do who could not be properly called malicious, but I think that deserves a little punishment in hell?”

AP: What made you settle in the period of the 80s?

Kuang: I just think that the 80s are very fun culturally for me. I am a child from the 90s, so I miss it. But I am also interested in the Reagan and Thatcher era. So I think that the 1970s and 80s are this period of reaction and the rise of neoliberalism and privatization against the type of cultural advances that had been made during the 1960s. So, in the 1960s, you had the era of civil rights then the 1970s and 80s, you have the return of many of these egalitarian movements.

I wanted my characters to work in a space where it seems that there is this widespread refusal on the existence of structural oppression – and they are really raised by this mentality that if things go wrong for them, then it is entirely their fault and they must get up by their acts of start -up, which is devastating because they do not then have the avenues for solidarity.

AP: I have to ask you questions about a line of the book: “On both sides of the Atlantic, the conservatives have been in power for several years and this meant funding reductions for universities, narrowing departments, disappearance opportunities.” Total coincidence?

Kuang: Yes, but I finished, I finished the revisions before the elections. So, I think that even in November, we did not know what kind of attacks against higher education would come to the following fall. So I do not write on this political moment, but it seems that we are back in the 80s.

AP: You are currently very steeped in this academic world. How do you treat this political moment?

Kuang: All I can do is continue to do my job. Because I think the final victory would simply be to roll and play and let the administration prevent us from continuing the research tracks that we have always continued. And they can make things as difficult as they can, but we shouldn’t just put our pens and move away.

AP: You don’t really watch people’s videos of people, either praising you or by revising your book?

Kuang: The last time I was on Tiktok was two years ago, and it was fun but it is a massive distraction. I firmly believe that Tiktok should be a space for readers. It is actually this wonderful thing which, like particularly younger readers, can become so enthusiastic about books and share their opinions and recommend things like that. It is really, really cool, especially at a time when things like reading are somehow under attack, especially with the prohibitions of books and all that.