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Babel
- Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution
- Narrated by: Chris Lew Kum Hoi, Billie Fulford-Brown
- Length: 21 hrs and 46 mins
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Publisher's summary
From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire.
Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel.
Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization.
For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide…
Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?
Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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Between film, television, literature, and audio—2022 could easily be proclaimed the Year of the Fantasy, much to the delight of fans among us. But when it came to picking the best of the best, the glut of fantastic content also significantly increased the CR (challenge rating). This year’s winner edged ahead of the rest thanks to its atmospheric, suck-you-in (pun intended) audio experience, but every performance on this list transported us.
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Joe Spork repairs clocks, a far cry from his late father, a flashy London gangster. But when Joe fixes one particularly unusual device, his life is suddenly upended. Joe's client, Edie Banister, is more than just a kindly old lady - she's a former superspy. And the device? It's a 1950s doomsday machine. And having triggered it, Joe now faces the wrath of both the government and a diabolical South Asian dictator, Edie's old arch-nemesis.
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A cure for the modern cynic
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By: Nick Harkaway
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Winter Tide
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After attacking Devil's Reef in 1928, the US government rounded up the people of Innsmouth and took them to the desert, far from their ocean, their Deep One ancestors, and their sleeping god, Cthulhu. Only Aphra and Caleb Marsh survived the camps, and they emerged without a past or a future. The government that stole Aphra's life now needs her help. FBI agent Ron Spector believes that communist spies have stolen dangerous magical secrets.
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Overrated on a Cosmic Scale
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By: Ruthanna Emrys
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Three Daughters of Eve
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Set across Istanbul and Oxford, from the 1980s to the present day, Three Daughters of Eve is a sweeping tale of faith and friendship, tradition and modernity, love and an unexpected betrayal. Peri, a wealthy Turkish housewife and mother, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag. As she wrestles to get it back, a photograph falls to the ground - an old polaroid of three young women and their university professor.
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Review 3 daughters of Eve
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By: Elif Shafak
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We Set the Dark on Fire
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- Narrated by: Kyla Garcia
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At the Medio School for Girls, distinguished young women are trained for one of two roles in their polarized society. Depending on her specialization, a graduate will one day run a husband’s household or raise his children. Both paths promise a life of comfort and luxury, far from the frequent political uprisings of the lower class. Daniela Vargas is the school’s top student, but her pedigree is a lie. She must keep the truth hidden or be sent back to the fringes of society. And school couldn’t prepare her for the difficult choices she must make after graduation.
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Undeveloped story and characters and setting
- By Hsin Yao Chou on 11-08-20
By: Tehlor Kay Mejia
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The Strangler Vine
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India, 1837: William Avery is a young soldier with few prospects except rotting away in campaigns in India; Jeremiah Blake is a secret political agent gone native, a genius at languages and disguises, disenchanted with the whole ethos of British rule, but who cannot resist the challenge of an unresolved mystery.
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Don't Waste Time Reading Reviews-Just Buy the Book
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By: M. J. Carter
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The Agency 1: A Spy in the House
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In Victorian England, orphan Mary Quinn lives on the edge. Sentenced as a thief at the age of 12, she’s rescued from the gallows by a woman posing as a prison warden. In her new home, Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy for Girls, Mary acquires a singular education, fine manners, and a surprising opportunity. The school is a cover for the Agency — an elite, top secret corps of female investigators with a reputation for results — and at 17, Mary’s about to join their ranks.
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yes, it's YA-but credible for genre for any age
- By connie on 02-25-11
By: Y. S. Lee
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Steeplejack
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Seventeen-year-old Anglet Sutonga lives repairing the chimneys, towers, and spires of the city of Bar-Selehm. Dramatically different communities live and work alongside each other. The white Feldish command the nation's higher echelons of society. The native Mahweni are divided between city life and the savannah. And then there's Ang, part of the Lani community who immigrated over generations ago as servants and now mostly live in poverty on Bar-Selehm's edges.
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Steeplejack Audio Climbs the Tops of Storytelling
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The Ambassador's Daughter
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Brought to the peace conference by her father, a German diplomat, Margot Rosenthal initially resents being trapped in the congested French capital, where she is still looked upon as the enemy. But as she contemplates returning to Berlin and a life with Stefan, the wounded fiancé she hardly knows anymore, she decides that being in Paris is not so bad after all. Bored and torn between duty and the desire to be free, Margot strikes up unlikely alliances: with Krysia, an accomplished musician with radical acquaintances and a secret to protect; and with Georg, the handsome, damaged naval officer who gives Margot a job.
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Book 0 in the series
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The Affair of the Porcelain Dog
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London, 1889. For Ira Adler, former rent-boy and present plaything of crime lord Cain Goddard, stealing back the statue from Goddard's blackmailer should have been a doddle. But inside the statue is evidence that could put Goddard away for a long time under the sodomy laws, and everyone's after it, including Ira's bitter ex, Dr. Timothy Lazarus.
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Brilliant book, Phenomenal audio experience!
- By 'Nathan on 04-24-13
By: Jess Faraday
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The Collectors' Society
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After years in Wonderland, Alice has returned to England as an adult, desperate to reclaim sanity and control over her life. An enigmatic gentleman with an intriguing job offer too tempting to resist changes her plans for a calm existence. Soon, she's whisked to New York and initiated into the Collectors' Society, a secret organization whose members confirm that famous stories are anything but straightforward and that what she knows about the world is only a fraction of the truth.
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A true adventure full of the classics!
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Spirit Legacy
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Some cryptic words wake college student Jess Ballard from a terrifying dream into an even more terrifying reality. Jess’ life has never been what anyone would call easy; doing damage control in the wake of your nomadic, alcoholic mother doesn't exactly make for a storybook childhood. But now, her world has fallen apart just when it should be coming together: her mother gone—dead under mysterious circumstances; her life uprooted to stay with estranged relatives she’s never met; and there’s something odd about some of the people she’s been meeting at school: They’re dead.
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My mistake
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The Becoming of Noah Shaw
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In the first book of the Shaw Confessions, the companion series to the New York Times best-selling Mara Dyer novels, old skeletons are laid bare and new promises prove deadly. This is what happens after happily ever after. Everyone thinks 17-year-old Noah Shaw has the world on a string. They're wrong. Mara Dyer is the only one he trusts with his secrets and his future. He shouldn't. And both are scared that uncovering the truth about themselves will force them apart. They're right.
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Fans will be torn on this one
- By kimbacaffeinate on 12-08-17
By: Michelle Hodkin
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What listeners say about Babel
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- Alex Levine
- 09-01-22
Between Allegory and Alternate History - 這也是翻譯
I infer from the preface that the author has recently had the experience of being an Asian-American sojourning in Oxford. It's clear the experience left its mark on her and on this story. The novel is excellent, though difficult for me to review without tossing in coy spoilers on how it ends. I'll restrain myself and say simply that as a student of the relevant history, I found the ending completely appropriate.
For centuries China had a global trade surplus--both in our timeline and in that of this alternate history, which closely parallels our own. This was probably the case even when the volume of global trade was constrained by the capacity of the silk road, but in the Early Modern Era, beginning with Portuguese sea trade in the Pacific, it began to grow exponentially. In an era when all transactions were still conducted in precious metals, the economic consequences of this surplus were difficult to understand, let alone predict. Philip II of Spain, his coffers bursting with the loot of the New World, had trouble grasping the difficulty he encountered outfitting his famous naval expedition of 1588. Without realizing it, he had discovered inflation. Money can seem so concrete when payments are made in weight-increments of silver or gold. In fact it is anything but. Money is abstract, and like those of many abstractions its ebbs and flows can seem like magic. Perhaps they ARE magic.
Spain's treasury did not remain full for long. All of that silver circulated throughout expanding markets, and in coming centuries a succession of very smart people with a range of different motives came to understand and exploit some of the underlying magical principles governing its circulation. One of these people, mentioned perhaps only once or twice in passing in Kuang's novel since he belonged to an earlier era, was the greatest physicist of his day and perhaps the greatest alchemist of all time, Isaac Newton. For the last three decades of his life Newton was Master of the Royal Mint, and in that capacity he worked magic by manipulating the conversion--or translation--between silver and gold to his own nation's advantage. He helped jump-start Britain's imperial and colonial expansion. This economic alchemy or magic was very real in our own timeline, and though it is not discussed in this book (though it plays an important role in Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle"), it may be assumed to have set the stage for its events, which take place in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century.
Newton's efforts notwithstanding, the Chinese global trade surplus meant that the West's silver, including that of Britain, continued to drain into China at an alarming rate, funding the importation of silks, tea, porcelain, lacquerware, and other such goods. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain's lords and magnates were wise to the problem. Their solution--again, in our own timeline as in that of this book--was to foist the opium trade on China, first by offering a lucrative product in sufficient quantity to produce a class of addicts willing and able to pay vast sums to obtain it it, and then, when authorities attempted to suppress the trade, at gunpoint. Thus did they engineer the First Opium War.
This much is simply widely accepted history. What Kuang does with this history could be described either as a fantasy subgenre of alternate history fiction, or as an allegory for colonial oppression. If I describe it as both, and hold both descriptions in my head simultaneously, I am ready to perform the kind of mental manipulation Kuang's Oxford scholars are trained in. 這也是翻譯--this too is translation. Allegorically, within the Tower of Babel of Kuang's Oxford, the manipulation is inscribed in silver, becoming or expressing a kind of magic.
I confess I'm enamored of this magic, in part because I, too, am a translator, working in several languages over the past four decades. No doubt Kuang's Oxfordians would dismiss much of my skill as that of a mere "natural polyglot," but I had to work hard for it, too. As a real-life translator, I will let you in on a secret: translation IS magic, and it only becomes more potent as people progressively forget that we exist at all, mediating their reading and their conversation. The greatest magic trick of the translator is to make themselves disappear. We all know that knowledge is power. Are we so confident we can always spot the most knowledgable?
In this review I've worn my own background and interests on my sleeve, and consequently what I've written is pretty dry. Kuang's novel is anything but. My review doesn't even touch on the characters and their wholly believable personal and historical struggles, all of which are absolutely engrossing. I am reminded of Arkady Martine's award-winning "A Memory of Empire" and its sequel, "A Desolation Called Peace," with which this book incidentally shares a very apt epigraph from Tacitus. I am not a huge fan of the audio production. The primary narrator does a good job with character voices, but there is a secondary narrator (perhaps for passages appearing as footnotes in the print edition?). The sound editing is uneven, and the Mandarin voicing of Chinese phrases and passages inconsistent, making some of them difficult to understand. At a guess, neither narrator is a native speaker. However, this will bother only those listeners with knowledge of Chinese.
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33 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 08-28-22
fabula sine simili est
An absolute thrill, beginning to end. I loved the characters, world building, themes, and magic system. The philosophies and debates and perspectives were thrilling to ponder. I felt like I learned and grew with the protagonist, and the mechanics had me yearning to study language and play with the possibilities.
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16 people found this helpful
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- Trevor Casperson
- 01-07-23
Great story marred by insecurity
I found the story and performance to be very enjoyable. Unfortunately, I was often distracted from the story by the footnotes that insisted on telling me things I either already knew or didn’t care to know about. It felt as if the author didn’t trust her readers to get her point through the story she told, and had to spell things out.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Travis Franklin
- 01-11-23
Couldn’t get into it
Spent the majority of the book trying to get involved in the story, but was never pulled in at any point. The premise sounded so interesting, but was let down. Glad some liked it, I stopped listening with about 5 hours left.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Emily Wang
- 04-21-23
Performance good, book is mediocre
Too long, characters don’t make that much sense. It’s a creative concept but she’s quite heavy handed with the social commentary and I didn’t connect to anybody.
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- Happy in Boston
- 01-13-23
Heavy Handed
Wholly lacking in believable characters. The characters feel like puppets inexpertly wielded in service of plot, without minds of their own, or even believable motivations for their actions.
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- Sally
- 11-26-22
written by a master
A thoughtful exploration of colonialism and the nature of human beings through a real scholars masterful lens.
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- Maria
- 12-02-22
Such a dazzling strange story
Been a moment since I read a book of such force and dark matter. Unforgettable
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- p.k.matt
- 01-08-23
Utter brilliance!
I can’t rave enough about how amazing & all consuming this book is, I can only hope there is a sequel to read! This book is brilliantly written & so intricate. The inter working so connected that I’m sure if I read it 2 more times I would pick up on more that I didn’t catch the first go. I may just reread it again today.
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- Kindle Customer
- 12-31-22
A Story with Conflicted Motivations
The “magic” mechanism in this story relies on the concept of “lost in translation” that occurs over the etymological evolution of words across languages. Engrave the word in one language on one side of a silver bar, then engrave the etymological counterpart in a different language on the other side - and the bar will manifest what was “lost in translation” between the two after the words are spoken by someone with a true grasp of the words.
This is, in my opinion, a sophisticated enough mechanism to be intriguing, and one that could have been a clever tool for making social commentary, especially, if deftly to a previous time period.
RF Kuang tried but I found the effort leaving something greatly desired.
When I compare this effort, for example, to Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”, it is not nearly as effective, primarily because the main motivation for Twain was clearly to satire and critique both the period to which his character “time travels” (medieval) as well as the period from which the protagonist traveled (late 19th century).
I think if RF Kuang had written with the same clear purpose and leaned into the effort, but with a more deft hand, this novel would have been a classic.
However, there is nothing light about her touch on social commentary.
Where Twain used expert comedic satire to draw a reader to take his own conclusions, Kuang attempts to use shock (at the tragedy that befalls the characters) and awe (at her complex and clear subject matter expertise over language and etymology) to bludgeon the reader into her’s - and her conclusions are neither original nor revelatory to anyone with an internet connection. I don’t know if Twain’s were in his time or not, however, even if his were as equally regurgitated as Kuang’s are here, he at least presented them with all the skill of an expert comedian and storyteller. Kuang’s effort seems very amateurish by comparison, which is understandable because she is both early in her career and may not be the type of generational talent that Twain was in the first place.
I think it’d be really interesting if Kuang were to rewrite this 30 years from now, as an older, more experienced author who has been removed from the universe of academia for a while.
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