“Katabasis” announces itself as a novel about ambition, punishment and the systems that shape who gets forgiven and who gets destroyed. It’s a book steeped in academic hunger and moral vertigo, drawing from Dante’s “Inferno” without ever feeling like simple imitation. Instead, R.F. Kuang uses the architecture of hell as a framework for a story about the modern academy and how it entices, degrades and ultimately devours the people inside it. The result is a novel that is brilliant, uncomfortable and pointedly uninterested in letting the reader stay neutral.
In “Katabasis,” magic exists and is honed in the bureaucratic way only academia allows. Precisely hand-drawn pentagrams and mind-numbingly difficult logic puzzles are the shaky scaffolding students climb toward degrees, grants and tenure. One dear post-graduate student, Alice Law, is our sojourner through hell, on a mission to retrieve the soul of the abusive academic advisor she sort-of killed. Despite her many grievances with the man, she needs him alive to complete her degree (and to inflict her own violences onto him).
What makes “Katabasis” so arresting is not simply its concept, but the people Kuang creates to move through it: characters rendered with the kind of clarity that makes their unraveling feel both inevitable and preventable. Kuang builds her cast as both individuals and archetypes, deeply human figures whose flaws just so happen to map neatly onto the punishments of Dante’s hell.
At the center of all this is Alice, whose ambition operates like a gravitational field. She is brilliant, defensive and hungry in ways that are both admirable and corrosive. Kuang refuses to frame this hunger as tragedy or triumph; instead, it becomes the compass by which every moral choice bends. Her psychological descent is not a fall but a series of small, perfectly reasonable decisions that accumulate until she’s left in free fall. Her tumultuous relationships with the surrounding characters serve to sharpen the novel’s central tension, asking us to consider how much of who we are is shaped by the institutions we want to belong to.
What may put some readers off is the novel’s sheer literariness; it is unabashedly epic in scope and unafraid to show its scaffolding. The structure echoes Dante’s guided descent through hell, except in this version Alice is guided by a rotating cast of dead academic advisors, meaning that every layer of her descent comes with a secondary stratum of academic critique. This meta-architecture was certainly an ambitious move, but I felt it occasionally drew me from the emotional core of the story given how much it echoed Dante-but-cleverer.
Yet while Kuang draws on the epic lineage of underworld journeys — Dante, Orpheus, Aeneas — her primary interest is not theological. Instead, she turns hell into a campus, reshaping each court into a commentary on the systems, pressures and abuses embedded in elite academic institutions. If Dante weaponized hell to illuminate the moral failures of medieval Florence, Kuang uses it to expose how modern academia reproduces hierarchy, cruelty and self-delusion under the guise of intellectual pursuit.
Dante arranged hell into nine circles that descend from natural landscapes toward increasingly architectural spaces — his version of the Florentine society and corruption within it. Kuang mirrors this movement, but her reconfiguration is pointedly institutional. Her hell begins with order — a library, a student center, the Bridge of Sighs — then collapses into deserts, bogs and mountains before finally returning to the hyper-constructed City of Dis. Easily, this reads as a reflection on the psychological arc of academic disillusionment: Students enter-believing in the structure, descending into competition and exploitation and, eventually, confronting the cold machinery of the institution itself.
Each court in “Katabasis,” while taking inspiration from Dante, is unmistakably academic in shape and logic. Pride unfolds in an infinite library where the work never ends; Desire compresses Lust and Gluttony into a single place defined by want and deprivation; Greed is reimagined as the Bridge of Sighs, its very structure composed of the souls who gave themselves over to their institution. As the descent continues, the courts shift from orderly spaces to chaotic terrains: bogs of furious souls, deserts of self-imprisonment and towers built on skeletons with soul-reading academic advisors perched on top. By the time Alice reaches Oathbreakers, Kuang’s reimagining of Treason, hell becomes a dissertation hall, its inhabitants drafting arguments for why they deserve another chance at life. The courts no longer feel like separate punishments but steps in a continuous downward journey, each space stranger, heavier and more consuming than the last.
Kuang uses hell not to map moral failures but to anatomize an institution and how it forms, distorts, exploits and seduces its members. “Katabasis” is less a spiritual allegory than an academic one, depicting a world where the pursuit of knowledge is inseparable from the systems that gatekeep it. Her hell is a university only because the university is already halfway to hell itself. Frequently, the Escher staircase is invoked: impossible, looping stairwells where every ascent is also a descent and no amount of effort will ever lead to escape. It’s an apt metaphor for academia, a place where students climb endlessly only to find themselves back where they started, repeating the same arguments, anxieties and rites of intellectual worthiness. Progress here is ouroboros, continually starting anew while simultaneously eating yourself as you go.
Still, the novel refuses to end in that trap. Alice abandons her original revenge plot, confronting not only the advisor who exploited her but the version of herself shaped by his shadow. Here, she decides to begin the slow work of remembering what it means to live rather than continuing to slave under the university. Her return is not triumphant, but deliberate. She chooses to seek connection rather than isolation, to value the world outside scholarly ambition. In a place built to devour her, Alice chooses to rebuild herself.
It was sickening to read. Alice’s compulsive need to achieve, to justify her existence through her academic output and to keep climbing even as the ground erodes beneath her — it all felt too familiar. I recognized this reflex to grind and chase the next marker of academic worth within me, even as I underlined passages warning against exactly that mindset. There’s a strange irony in reading this book and analyzing this character who learns to relinquish the very ambitions I still cling to. It’s like watching someone slip out of Sisyphus’ trap while still bracing my shoulder against the rock, muttering, “Good for him, but what about the rest of us?”
What lingers after the intellectual cleverness fades is Kuang’s insistence that the descent is not the point; the return is. “Katabasis” may be a fervent critique of academia, but it is also a story about reassembling a self fractured by it. The strength of the novel comes from this duality: its ability to reveal how institutions deform us while still believing in the possibility of emerging intact. Kuang’s hell is brutal, but her narrative refuses nihilism. Instead, it gestures toward the quiet, stubborn — yet still worthwhile — discipline of remembering how and why to live. A discipline I can start reaching for.
Daily Arts Writer Estlin Salah can be reached at essalah@umich.edu.
