i’ve read two hundred and ten pages of this allegedly academic book and all i’ve come away with is the fact that i can’t stand rf kuang’s writing style. the author’s note in the beginning is completely unnecessary and feels like it’s no more than yet another way for her to flex the fact that she studied in oxford unlike the rest of us plebeians. “the trouble with writing an oxford novel is that anyone who has spent time at oxford will [nitpick] your text” yes, yes—is that not exactly what happens with any other real-world setting? you’ll have to forgive me for not understanding how ivory-towered oxford is any different.

now for my review of the actual book, which will be done in bullet points because this book is not worth the time and effort a full-length review will require:

• rfk can’t seem to decide whether she wants to use pinyin (with godsforsaken diacritics) or the actual characters themselves when she inserts chinese words into the narration. there’s seemingly no rhyme or reason to which she chooses to use at any point in time and i absolutely loathe it. if you want to switch between transliteration and using the actual characters, i beg you to come up with a coherent system for it.
• robin speaks mandarin in 1820s guangzhou, which is the most absurd thing i’ve ever heard of in my life. unless you had to deal with the imperial court, most chinese people would simply speak their own local variety. indeed, most chinese people today speak their own regional varieties, be it of mandarin or their topolect. watch literally any variety show, particularly if you speak a southern variety, and you will notice that even the form of mandarin most celebrities (being northerners) speak differs from standard mandarin. rfk inserts a footnote two chapters later to explain that it’s because robin’s family migrated from beijing recently, which would be a logical explanation for why robin speaks mandarin in his own home, but then claims cantonese is robin’s “preferred native tongue”? and yet he seems to instinctively revert to mandarin? make it make sense.
• the fact that pinyin is used in a book about languages and translation set in the 1820s KILLS me. the 1820s predates even wades-giles, which—no matter how much i hate the sight of it—would at least in turn predate pinyin, which was only created/formalised in the 1950s. more than a century later. rfk would’ve been much better served doing less research on oxford for historical accuracy and more on the languages her protagonist speaks, i think. also, there’s that glaring (but unfortunately lost) opportunity to make some meta-commentary on the colonisation of language and translation (very relevant for this book, i believe!) in using wades-giles (a transliteration system created by white men) instead of pinyin (which was created by chinese people).
• speaking of historical accuracy and oxford, there are a bunch of things rfk openly admits to changing—not for any narrative purpose, no, but simply to parallel her characters’ experience to her own. for instance, despite “oysters being a staple of the early-victorian poor”, rfk “choose[s] to make them a delicacy” because “heaps and heaps of oysters on ice” was her “first impression of the 2019 may ball at magdalene college, cambridge”. the fact that this paragraph is then followed up with the sentence “if you find any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself this is a work of fiction”—which, in fact, suffices to sum up her entire two-page author’s note—makes this justification completely fucking insufferable. either own your inaccuracies or cut them. quit dithering.
• rfk mistypes 無形 / incorporeal as 五行 / the five phases, despite 無形 being used correctly in the previous sentence. in the same page, she proceeds to translate “help me” as 幫忙 / help, which is such a clunky and awkward translation from a professional chinese-english translator that i am embarrassed on her behalf. i would’ve translated “help me” as 幫我 or 助我 (a more formal alternative which i think fits better in this context).
• the politics really are just twittercore but couched in a vaguely victorian-sounding register. i say “vaguely” because it really isn’t all that victorian. it just sounds like a slightly formal modern register. and apparently this problem is consistent with her other books, particularly yellowface, though it would at least make more sense for her to be responding to a very online form of criticism there.
• the fact that she uses a long-running stem/arts joke as an explanation for why babel hasn’t noticed the hermes society stealing their silver is just astoundingly beyond any capacity for suspension of disbelief i have. “for the virtue of a humanities faculty … was that everyone was hopeless with numbers” are you joking. is this a joke to you. you cannot possibly expect me to take this seriously.
• everything they’ve said and been taught about translation so far has been incredibly basic, and i’m only an amateur translator. i’d be embarrassed on oxford’s behalf if they truly taught this to third-year undergraduates.
• chattel slavery is a “wholly european invention” now :)
• despite this being an adult novel and therefore requiring some level of sophistication and maturity on the reader’s part, rfk can’t seem to resist the urge to shove her opinions—all entirely correct, of course—in the reader’s face. it’s pretty humiliating to read a book whose author seems to believe that the reader can’t go two sentences without being reminded that “racism bad” in the footnotes. of course it is, but i’d like to believe that it’s also possible to write a novel critiquing racism, elitism, and colonialism in academia without such hamfisted arguments.

anyway, i do think this novel does something good for the dark academia genre, in that it critiques the elitism inherent to academia, and it does have some good points about translation and colonialism and the like, but i think more subtlety and elegance would’ve served it better—and also better editing and proof-reading, because it’s genuinely embarrassing for your protagonist to make such errors in his native language(s).

✧─── ･ ｡ﾟ★: .✦ . :★. ───✧

pre-reading

why is he speaking mandarin in canton...

edit: they’re also using pinyin despite it not having been created until the 1950s? correct me if i’m wrong but the transliteration systems in use until the mid-19th century were based on nanjingese? so even if they did have a reason to speak mandarin it wouldn’t have been romanised this way

This book wanted to pretend like it wasn't Christian pedagogy so bad.

The Bright Years started out strong. A complex story about grief, familial disconnection, womanhood and motherhood that promised deep reflection, raw emotion, and tragedy interwoven with hope and healing.

Especially potent for me was the central theme circled around the first third of the book: How do you process grief for a person that is still living, yet lost? The book was moving toward such a nuanced understanding, asking the reader how far love can stretch, and what happens when love is no longer enough.

Damoff's writing style is both her greatest strength and her greatest weakness. Shining with stunning imagery and thought-provoking philosophy, there were several times I stopped in awe.

These moments were overshadowed by the many times Damoff picked up a sledgehammer and beat me over the head with her morality. So many lines so eye-rollingly on-the-nose that there was no room to breathe, let alone feel what Damoff was trying to make me feel. Symbolism so in-your-face that it might as well have been neon flashing signs.

The boundary of the imagination of The Bright Years is narrow. The ultimate salvation in this book comes through birth, motherhood, marriage. Family redeems pain, birth redeems loss, continuity redeems trauma, and faith redeems harm. Deep down, The Bright Years wants you to believe that there is something that will make suffering meaningful and redemptive.

The book constantly circles around the idea of children bringing meaning, hope, and healing. That children can save your life, and it's okay if they are harmed in the process, because redemption is possible, and forgiveness can be earned.

In a book about grief, cycles, and how the choices we make ripple into generations, quietly returning to the idea of family being a form of destiny is constrained. Not malicious, but morally small. It's claustrophobic, a socially sanctioned morality that aligns extremely neatly with white, middle-class, patriarchal norms of success and healing.

Stripping away what the book intends to do, and looking at what it achieves, I'm only left with an empty feeling that there is a right way to suffer, a right way to womanhood, a right way to grieve, a right way to end the cycle. Dark topics like adoption, abuse, addiction, eating disorders lack the emotional weight they deserve when they are used as plot devices to push a moral conclusion.

What gets lost in all of this is the real-world harm. Suffering doesn't always build character. Cycles don't always end in redemption. Self-sacrifice isn't always virtuous. Love doesn't always overcome addiction or transcend harm. This book ends in a version of reality denied to so many people, and wraps it in a moralizing package. If your addict parents didn't choose redemption, it's not because they didn't love you, but also it kind of is.

The Bright Years is a package of evangelical values without the evangelical disclosure. So much opportunity for complex discussions of abuse, healing, and generational cycles, and all I could ever feel while reading was emotionally manipulated.