fatma's Reviews > Katabasis

Katabasis is Info Dump: The Novel. It's a novel that seems to mistake information for narrative, so caught up in its ideas and "clever" logic that it loses sight of basically everything else. How could a novel this long have been so allergic to storytelling? I swear, it felt like all the information in this book was delivered through massive chunks of exposition. Explaining how Hell works? Massive chunk of exposition. Exploring the characters' lives and experiences? Massive chunk of exposition. Critical moment where the characters finally talk to each other? Massive chunk of exposition.

And it's not even that it's a lazy novel, but rather that its energy is entirely misdirected: rather than spend time fleshing out its characters' dynamics or storylines (which, let me tell you, are frustratingly threadbare and massively underwhelming), it funnels almost all its energy into explaining scholarly theories and paradoxes and logic and math etc etc etc. And the fact of the matter is, I can't invest in ~Ideas~ and ~Theory~ when they're not grounded in solid storytelling with solid character dynamics. The result being that Katabasis read like a textbook with the thin veneer of a novel imposed onto it. This whole novel just felt like an inside joke I didn't get--and by the end, I really had no desire to "get" it, anyway.

(thank you to hrc for the eARC!)