The Tower of Babel, also known as the Tower of Babylon, looks a bit like a trapezoid, with some levels from top to bottom, of course, this book does not mainly tell the story of this tower, but only uses the shell of the Tower of Babel to fill in the stories of language, translation, history and magic.
The author constructs a magical world, the Tower of Babel is the translation center of this world, and at the same time the center of magic, there are many drawings in the book, there are maps of Oxford City, there are also maps of this tower, it should be said that it is a structural map of this tower, showing the internal structure of this tower in the form of sections, from bottom to top is divided into reception hall, legal department, interpretation department, literature department, reference room, classroom, faculty office, silver engraving department, etc. Of course, the Tower of Babel mentioned in the book is not the Tower of Babel, it should be a tall tower in the city of Oxford, probably because it is very similar to the Tower of Babylon, all of them are called the Tower of Babel, or maybe the name of the Tower of Babel should not be a specific name, but as a general name for this type of tower.
This book puts the background in Oxford City, and it is easy for everyone to substitute the Oxford City they know, but Oxford City has changed a lot throughout the ages, the names of many places, and the names of many things are not quite the same, and the Oxford City described by the author here may be different from the Oxford City in your mind, but according to the author himself, in order to write this book, the author has conducted in-depth research and investigation on Oxford City, and the Oxford City he said is basically not much different from the real history. After all, the focus of the book is on the story of translation and magic, and you can understand that this is also a fantasy book, and we don't have to spend too much experience to delve into the details of the city of Oxford, about the inside of the Tower of Babel in Oxford.
This book is 16 folios, more than 600 pages, more than 500,000 words, the decoration is very luxurious, using bronzing technology, touching a more layered feeling, the main color is a black background, the black and white Tower of Babel is embedded in it, the top of the tower is the yellow-brown "Tower of Babel" three big characters, the whole book looks very atmospheric, a faint fragrance of books, giving people a very strong desire to read.
The author, Kuang Lingxiu, is a 27-year-old Chinese female writer who has won the Nobel Prize in science fiction, the Nebula Award, the Locator, and the British National Book Award. Her work won the Best Novel ** Award at the 58th American Science Fiction Nebula Awards, the Best Fantasy Feature ** Award at the 2023 Locates Awards, and the 2023 British National Book Award, so this is a work worth looking forward to, because the original text of this book is written in English, and readers with conditions can read the original English text first, and then read the translation, so that they can better understand the story told by this book.
This book is very long, with an epic macro narrative, the author has done his best to restore the ancient campus of Oxford, the boy named Robin wants to shake the empire is unimaginable, he wants to do something, he must rely on his wisdom, and by stones, unite many people, to overcome difficulties together to shake the foundation of the empire. Some important inventions, such as the invention of the telegraph and the camera, and the invention of the steam engine, which were the driving force of the British Industrial Revolution and the colonial expansion of the British Empire, are all related to magic, and the characters and activities in the book overlap with real history, making the book's historical weight more prominent.
The premise of this book is that language is magic, so how does magic come about, magic is produced in the semantics lost in translation, as long as there is a difference between the original meaning of a word after it is translated during the translation process, magic will be generated, and magic will be generated on silver bars. For example, swallowing jujubes means the taste of jujubes that you can't eat without chewing and swallowing them in your stomach. When the magic was generated, sweet and greasy tastes filled his mouth. He was about to choke to death from dates. His throat was so tight that he couldn't breathe. This book also believes that translation is betrayal, so as long as it is translated, it is impossible for all the content to be exactly the same as the original meaning, and the misinterpretation will appear all the time, and it is impossible for the original text and the translation to have a one-to-one correspondence, so the author believes that translation is a dance in shackles, an art of regret, and a curse of the Tower of Babel. When this kind of magic appears more and more, these will be captured and displayed by silver bars, ** the Industrial Revolution was born, and the engraved silver bars will help the British Empire to receive all the world's ** into their own pockets.
Of course, the book also tells the adventures of Robin, who is addicted to magic, and several of his friends in the magic battle, which makes this book full of suspense and fun, in order to maintain the mystery of the content in the book, I will not tell them one by one here.
It took me more than two weeks to finish reading this book, and for the first time I saw a story about the magic of translation, and it also made me feel the very interesting elements of Oxford, about the industrial revolution, about magical adventures.