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Tag: onward and upward with the arts

  • The Strange Afterlife of Hilma af Klint, Painting’s Posthumous Star

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    Later, af Klint claimed—implausibly, according to some historians—that Steiner had warned her that the world was not ready for what she was attempting to reveal, and that, discouraged, she stopped painting for eight years. When she resumed, she said, she worked at great scale and intensity. But she decreed that the works were to remain unseen for twenty years after her death, protected from ignorant audiences. Only decades later would it become evident that Hilma af Klint had produced one of the most significant creative innovations of the twentieth century.

    “It was delicious,” Louise Belfrage, a scholar and a colleague of Almqvist’s, said. “You have this woman genius, a prophet, making abstract paintings before Kandinsky? I mean, come on! It’s just so attractive.” Belfrage spoke of af Klint’s story like someone who had just been caught swiping icing off a cake: helpless, only half sorry. “It’s almost irresistible,” she said, and laughed.

    Soon after encountering af Klint’s work, Belfrage and Almqvist began to organize more seminars on her through the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit, the research and education nonprofit that Almqvist heads. Held everywhere from Oslo to Israel, they featured an impressively interdisciplinary selection of scholars, whose lectures touched on everything from early-twentieth-century scientific breakthroughs to occult philosophy. For Almqvist, af Klint became the magnifying glass through which a remote age could come alive. Almqvist and Belfrage compiled the talks into luxuriously produced books; Almqvist himself contributed essays and introductions.

    When, in 2018, the Guggenheim exhibited “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” “it was as if the Vatican of abstraction had canonized her,” Julia Voss, a German historian whose biography of the artist appeared soon afterward, said. The choice of venue seemed almost prophetic. Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral rotunda looked eerily like a temple to house her works which af Klint had once imagined. The show became one of the most visited in the Guggenheim’s history, and its paintings became a permanent backdrop on social media. In the Times, Roberta Smith wrote that af Klint’s paintings “definitively explode the notion of modernist abstraction as a male project.”

    In the past decade, Hilma af Klint’s life has been reimagined as historical fiction, a children’s book, and a graphic novel. It has inspired at least two operas, a documentary, a bio-pic, a virtual-reality experience, and a six-hundred-square-foot permanent mosaic inside the New York City subway system.

    To Voss, this is the promise of art history: that death can confer the glory that life refuses, that what looks like failure might in fact be redemption deferred. “It’s soothing, I think, to see something so great and so beautiful that was not successful in its own time,” she said.

    Almqvist has come to believe that the resurrection of af Klint has also produced fantasies. In the nearly thirteen years since his first encounter with the artist, Almqvist has instated himself as a kind of one-man Greek drama—chorus and actor both, once the herald of plot and now its complicator. His own writing on af Klint, he told me, has turned out to be riddled with mistakes. “When you have someone like Hilma, where there are just so many holes to fill in, it opens things up for, well, conspiracy theories, quite frankly,” Almqvist said. “Most of what one knows about, or what one encounters in the literature about Hilma, is actually just myth.”

    But even myths require caretakers. In recent years, the question of who those caretakers should be—and what, exactly, they are protecting—has become something of a national debate in Sweden. As af Klint’s fame has grown, so have the questions—about what she believed, whom she worked with, and who should be allowed to speak in her name. The disputes play out in boardrooms and court filings and newspaper columns. They are often framed as debates about af Klint’s life and her past, but what is really at stake is her afterlife—her legacy, what it means, and who should get to define it in the future.

    The voices of astral beings suggested to af Klint that she should paint not reality as it seemed but a truer version, which lay beyond the material world.Photograph from Science History Images / Alamy

    In the autumn of 1944, when af Klint was eighty-one, she fell while getting off a streetcar in Stockholm; a few weeks later, she died from her injuries. In her will, she named her nephew, Erik af Klint, as her heir. Erik, an admiral in the Navy, was too busy to administer his aunt’s body of work, so Olof Sundström, a close friend of hers, catalogued the archive. But Erik remained involved. “It is my opinion that, at least for the time being, the work should only be seen by people who understand its value and can feel reverence for it,” he wrote to Sundström, in 1946. Journalists, he added, “are, of course, not allowed to come near it.”

    It was not until Erik had retired from the military that he began to tackle the question of what to actually do with the massive corpus of material—more than twelve hundred paintings and drawings and a hundred and twenty-four notebooks. He considered it his responsibility to find a permanent home for the works, but he was unsure how best to proceed and consulted various scholars and museums. To one, he spoke of a desire to “organize an exhibition to generate interest in it among a wider audience”; to another he said that the work should be displayed only “within closed societies,” and warned that “releasing it to the public can never lead to anything good.” In 1970, Erik met with people from Moderna Museet and the national museum to discuss a large-scale exhibition, but the idea was eventually abandoned. Ultimately, the Anthroposophical Society of Sweden agreed to house the archive, and in 1972 Erik established the Hilma af Klint Foundation. Its statutes prohibit the sale of af Klint’s most significant works—so as to safeguard them for, in the words of the four-page document, “spiritual seekers”—and require that the board be chaired by a member of the af Klint family, with the remaining seats occupied by members of the Anthroposophical Society.

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    Alice Gregory

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  • Rian Johnson Is an Agatha Christie for the Netflix Age

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    When the film director Rian Johnson was a child, he picked up the final book that Agatha Christie published before her death, in 1976: “Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case.” The novel was sitting on a shelf in his grandparents’ sprawling home, in Denver. It had a moody black cover that featured an illustration of the mustachioed detective Hercule Poirot. “It felt very adult,” Johnson told me recently. “Very creepy.” The story takes place at a grand country house where the guests have an unfortunate habit of dying, or nearly dying, under seemingly unrelated circumstances. A hunting accident. A poisoning. A bullet to the head.

    The book was not only a dynamite mystery; it also represented a kind of magic trick. Although it was published at the end of Christie’s life, she wrote the manuscript in the middle of her career, in the nineteen-forties. Then, in a twist worthy of Poirot, she sealed it away in a bank vault for thirty years, insuring that it was kept secret. As her popularity waned, she suddenly produced—voilà!—a book written at the height of her powers. The novel was, Johnson said, “very mysterious and awesome, and very, very weird.” Soon, he was bingeing Christie novels two or three at a time. He once walked into a fire hydrant while reading one.

    In Los Angeles, earlier this year, Johnson’s normally mild countenance grew animated as he recounted the plot of “Curtain.” “Do you want it spoiled?” he asked. “Do you really?” We were sitting in the sunlit offices of his production company, T-Street, surrounded by shelves filled with trinkets: a hollow Bible concealing a cigar, an engraved knife. On the wall was a print by the eighteenth-century artist Matthias Buchinger, who was born without hands or legs, from the collection of the late magician Ricky Jay. Johnson, who is short, with a salt-and-pepper beard, has a nerdy, understated demeanor. He was dressed casually, in the type of short-sleeved button-down you might wear to a family barbecue. He believes that people-pleasing leads well into directing. If you didn’t know better, you might mistake him for a particularly nice I.T. guy.

    In 2019, Johnson tried his own hand at a murder mystery with the film “Knives Out.” Close-quartered and stylish, the movie begins at a Gothic New England mansion where the wealthy patriarch Harlan Thrombey has been found with his throat slit. Harlan has an avaricious family, each member of which has something to gain from his death. Like Christie’s novels, the film is a study of its time. The Thrombeys argue bitterly about politics, money, and immigration. (“Alt-right troll,” Harlan’s granddaughter says to her cousin. “Liberal snowflake,” he responds.) Like Christie, Johnson gave his mystery a detective with a high regard for his own intellect: the Southern gentleman Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig. The film was a surprise hit with critics and audiences. The Guardian called it “deliciously entertaining.”

    At fifty-one, Johnson is a Hollywood rarity: a writer-director with a singular vision, able to turn his oddball, idiosyncratic stories—written by hand, in moleskin notebooks—into blockbuster hits. He flits among genres, creating intricate, puzzle-like plots that reward multiple viewings. The success of “Knives Out” cemented Johnson’s status as an Agatha Christie for the Netflix age. Natasha Lyonne, who stars in his mystery TV series, “Poker Face,” told me, “His plots are all right there in his mind’s eye.” In the writers’ room, he will quietly flesh out inventive killings while others are discussing home renovations, then reveal them with a flourish. Craig said, of Johnson, “He’s always playing 4-D chess.”

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    Anna Russell

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  • The Man Who Sells Unsellable New York Apartments

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    In the city’s turbulent market, Jason Saft doesn’t just beautify properties. He reveals the new life they could bring you.

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    Alexandra Schwartz

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  • The Exacting Magic of Film Restoration

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    Curing these maladies is a delicate task, with a set of tools and potions to match. De Sanctis was armed with Q-tips, glue, isopropyl alcohol, lemon oil, and eucalyptus oil (handy for removing any adhesive residue from the surface of a film); a separate room, devoted to slowing or reversing chemical deterioration, gave me an odd sense of having wandered into a witch’s kitchen. Little rolls of film, no bigger than hockey pucks, sat inside a large glass pot, under a lid, together with silica gel. A label on the front read “Desiccation treatment.” Different threats—damp, humidity, heat, old age, and so on—call for different defenses, and another pot was labelled “Softening treatment (camphor).” I was frankly disappointed not to come across a brain in a jar.

    After the gluing, the taping, and the chemistry lesson, it was time for the washing—or, to be exact, for an introduction to the BSF Hydra. This is a magnificent beast, made by a British company, Cinetech, and its job is to clean film. To the movie-maddened eye, it resembles one of those machines that you see in the background of a Bond film, at the core of a villain’s lair, being operated by a random scientist in a white coat. (Needless to say, the poor sap can expect to be vaporized, thanks to 007, in a giant fireball.) The cleaning is done with a noncombustible solvent, plus a complex array of capstans, rollers, and “soft nap Dacron buffers,” zipping through as much as a hundred feet of film per minute. At L’Immagine Ritrovata, the Hydra also represents a border: the line at which the care of film as physical stuff, by hand, approaches its end. Beyond lies further alchemy, as film is transmuted into digital form.

    The first of the digital chores is scanning. Enter a room suffused with dark-blue luminescence, as if you were diving in a grotto, and you are greeted by the Arriscan, another benevolent monster, which emits regular pulses of light. Up to five frames per second can be scanned, and there is an exciting option called “wetgate,” which sounds like a scandal involving a congressman in a hot tub. In fact, as Cenciarelli explained to me, it has a salutary effect: “The emulsion is so scratched, and the lines are so deep, that basically it’s scanned very slowly under liquid that fills in those wrinkles, like wrinkles on human skin.” Botox for movies!

    Next up is comparison (which entails a frame-by-frame analysis of the sources, in low-resolution digital files), followed by digital cleaning and retouching. The latter, in place of solvents and soft buffers, deploys costly software programs that sound like cheap perfumes—Phoenix, Diamant, and “Revival by Blackmagic.” Still to come: 2K and 4K color correction, mastering, subtitling, sound restoration, and a glass of sweet wine to go with your dessert. And don’t forget the Arrilasers, machines that allow digital images to be recorded onto 35-mm. film, thus allowing you, in style, to come full circle.

    Of all these stages in the process, color correction is the one most likely to baffle the lay intruder—the untutored innocent who doesn’t understand, say, what the hell colors have to do with a black-and-white movie, and why they may need correcting. The truth is that subtleties of tonal range, not least brightness and contrast, can be adjusted by the corrector-in-chief. At the laboratory, I watched Simone Castelli, who sat at a wide console, facing a screen on which appeared a scene from “Tout Ça Ne Vaut Pas l’Amour” (1931), a comedy directed by Jacques Tourneur. (Eleven years later, in Hollywood, he made “Cat People.” Quite a jump.) In the center of the console were three domed knobs; as Castelli turned these, ever so gently, with the finesse of a safecracker, the impact of the images was altered. The black of a man’s jacket grew funereally dark. This brief modification was enough to ruffle the conscience of a film critic. When we praise a movie for being visually rich and, for good measure, savor that richness for its deliberate emotional intent, are we doing anything more than reacting to a tweak? What does it say about the force of a film that it can literally be dialled up and down? As Cenciarelli said of the restorative process, “After all those years, there are so many philosophical bells that ring.”

    For expert advice on these niceties, I assumed, no authority would be of greater assistance than the director of the film that is being restored, if he or she is still alive. Wrong. Céline Pozzi, a manager at L’Immagine Ritrovata, laughed at my naïveté. Directors, apparently, can be a problem. “For example, Wong Kar-wai. He had this special neon look on his films, and he wanted to change it and get away from that cold light,” Pozzi told me. “He said, ‘I’m not the person I was at the time. I’ve changed. I have the right to change the film.’ ” Shades of Chaplin in 1942. All the more reason, Pozzi added, to get a movie scanned: “Preservation is always the base of everything. Then you can have discussions. If you are clear in your aim about the restoration, that’s the most important thing.”

    One person who has pondered these conundrums as much as anybody is Ross Lipman, who was the senior film preservationist at the U.C.L.A. Film & Television Archive for seventeen years. He now runs his own company, Corpus Fluxus, and has recently written a book, “The Archival Impermanence Project,” about the methods and the implications of restoring film. The title may have the tang of a prog-rock album, but the book is witty, minutely detailed, and braced by common sense—a welcome gift in an often obsessive environment. The funniest bit is a footnote, in which Lipman directs us to a tiny corner of professional dissent. “At a fundamental level, even the light passing through the projectors has changed, as modern 35mm projectors use xenon bulbs with different characteristics than traditional carbon arcs,” he writes. “Carbon arc enthusiasts in fact represent a highly specialized subgroup within the extended archival film community.” I like to think of fights breaking out in projection booths as rival gangs, the Xenons and the Arcs, come to bitter blows.

    Cartoon by Joline Jourdain

    The moral of these quarrels is that the past really is another country, and that we can never live there. At best, we can pay a courtesy call. That is why, if you have any interest in the collision of old and new, in any field of endeavor—architecture, archeology, sexuality, table manners—I recommend “The Gray Zone,” a particular chapter of Lipman’s book. He defines the zone as “that uncharted territory where a preservationist needs to make decisions when there is no definitive guide left by the filmmakers.” In such circumstances, he adds, authenticity is impossible. He prefers to ask if a restoration is faithful.

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    Anthony Lane

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  • Bella Freud’s Podcast Offers a Talking Cure

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    It can take a lifetime to reckon with the legacy of a complicated parent, and Lucian Freud, in addition to being a great artist, was a parent of prodigious unconventionality. Born in 1922 in Berlin, he fathered at least fourteen children, mostly out of wedlock, across four decades. He never shared a home with his partners or his children for more than a brief period; in 1961, the year of Bella’s birth, he became a father to two other daughters, with two other mothers. (William Feaver, in his biography of Lucian, includes the artist’s explanation for this paternal clustering: “Don’t you realize I had a bicycle?”) The first portrait that Lucian made of Bella, “Baby on a Green Sofa” (1961), depicts her asleep, tiny arms flung back and fists clenched. But her earliest appearance in his work had come the previous year, in “Pregnant Girl,” a tender portrait of Bella’s mother, Bernardine Coverley, asleep on a couch, with swollen breasts and a rounded belly.

    Coverley was just eighteen when Bella was born. The daughter of an English father and an Irish mother, she worked in the mailroom of a newspaper on Fleet Street by day and socialized with the artists of Soho by night. Lucian installed Coverley and Bella in an apartment on Camden Road, in North London. Bella saw her father occasionally during her early childhood; he once based a painting, now lost, on a photograph of himself bending solicitously over her on the Regent’s Canal towpath. But not long after Esther was born, in 1963, their parents’ relationship ended.

    In the years that followed, Bella told me, “it just felt like our life was in transit the whole time.” For years, Coverley kept her daughters’ existence a secret from her own parents. Lucian’s financial provisions were sporadic, and Coverley’s life became improvisational. She moved with her daughters to Kent; then, when Bella was six and Esther was four, Coverley took them to Marrakech for eighteen months—a period of exotic and penurious displacement which Esther later chronicled in “Hideous Kinky,” a semi-autobiographical novel, from 1992, narrated by a younger sister in awe of her fierce sibling. Esther told me that, though she always thought of herself as having had a happy childhood, “Bella, as far back as I can remember, was bristling with utter fury.” Esther went on, “I’d be, like, ‘Wow, look at this house we’re moving to!’ and Bella was always, like, ‘Nightmare.’ ” While Esther formed a dyad with her mother—“I worshipped her, and I just wanted to lie in her bed, in her arms,” she recalled—Bella clearly had an affinity for her father. “As soon as we glimpsed him, she was, like, ‘That’s the person I’m gravitating toward,’ ” Esther said.

    Bella recalled her childhood as lacking in boundaries, with adults engaged in experimental ways of living which purported to offer freedom but in fact undermined any sense of security. “It was such a stupid time, all these seventies notions of idealism,” she said. She remembers being perpetually hungry, not so much because she was deprived but because of living in households committed to whole-food vegetarian diets: “We seemed to have no food that didn’t take twenty-four hours to cook.” While the family was in North Africa, Coverley travelled to Algeria in pursuit of a spiritual teacher, taking Esther with her but leaving Bella with acquaintances in Marrakech. These acquaintances, too, moved on, placing Bella in the care of strangers; when Coverley and Esther returned, they had no idea where Bella was and spent hours hunting for her. (In the movie version of “Hideous Kinky,” starring Kate Winslet as Coverley, this harrowing episode is a turning point in the family’s curdled adventure.) Bella told me, “I didn’t really know where or when my mother was coming back—or if she was coming back.” The experience was so distressing that she never discussed it with her mother, who died in 2011.

    “It’s always great to get the old crew back together, fire up the grill, crack open some cold ones, and remember that if we met today we wouldn’t be friends.”

    Cartoon by Adam Sacks

    In Morocco, Bella had few clothes, and she chose to dress in boyish garments rather than in the caftans favored by her mother. This self-fashioning, she now realizes, was in part a defense against the shame of poverty. When Coverley and the girls returned to England, in 1969, Lucian arranged for Bella to spend time with some aristocratic hippies who travelled around southern England in caravans. Bella, in her podcast conversation with Trinny Woodall, recalled that once, at a village post office, a shop assistant disdainfully called her a hippie. “I thought I was a cool person,” she said. “I was so mortified. I remember what I was wearing—a blue jumper, some scruffy old cords, and a kerchief around my throat, to try to be like Heathcliff from ‘Wuthering Heights.’ ” Among the travelling group was Penny Cuthbertson, a friend of Lucian’s and his sometime subject. The caravan experience appealed to Bella, not because of the wandering but, rather, because Cuthbertson offered structure. She was strict about bedtimes, and Bella told me, “I realized, I like this. And that was quite a shock, to like something that you were supposed to be rebelling against.”

    Bella spent the years between eight and sixteen living, malcontentedly, in Sussex. Her mother entered into a relationship with a teacher in whose home she and the girls were lodgers. Coverley eventually had a baby with him—Freud’s half brother Noah. The teacher, who effectively became Freud’s stepfather for several years, taught English and theatre, and his older students often hung out at the house, making Freud uneasy. “I hated him,” she told me. Freud’s own education, at a Waldorf school, was ostensibly progressive, but it was hidebound with rules she despised. “You weren’t allowed to wear black. They didn’t like corners,” she said, alluding to the belief held by Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Waldorf education, that rounded forms were the most harmonious. When Freud told me this story, she was seated in an angular black Lucite armchair and dressed in narrow black pants and a black sweater, along with a pair of shiny white platform sandals over socks. “You weren’t allowed to have your own taste,” she said. “As you can imagine, it was like a red rag to a bull.”

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    Rebecca Mead

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  • The Otherworldly Ambitions of R. F. Kuang

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    Rebecca F. Kuang finished her second year of college with little sense of what she wanted to do with her life. In the fall of 2015, she took a leave from Georgetown, where she was studying international economics, and got a job in Beijing as a debate instructor. In her spare time, she took coding classes online. “I really like mastering the rules of something and then seeing if I can crack it and get really good at it,” she told me. One day, while on a coding website, she came across an ad for Scrivener, a popular word-processing application. Though she had dabbled in fan fiction, she had little experience as a writer. But Scrivener seemed so easy to use that she downloaded it and began writing a fantasy story. Kuang didn’t know much about structuring a story, so she searched Google for how-to books about plotting, world-building, and character development. Each time she finished a chapter, she e-mailed it to her father in Texas, where she’d grown up. He was an ideal reader, offering nothing but praise and a desire for more. When she sent him the final chapter, he asked, “What are you going to do now?” She consulted Google again and, about seven months after she’d begun writing, found an agent.

    “The Poppy War,” which was published in 2018, as Kuang was preparing to graduate from college, tells the story of Fang Runin, or Rin, a young orphan from a poor region of the Nikan lands—a thinly veiled China—who distinguishes herself among the privileged students at an élite military school. (Kuang has described Rin as a reimagination of Mao Zedong as a teen-age girl.) Rin possesses shamanic powers that can call forth a vengeful god, but victory on the battlefield doesn’t result in the harmony she had hoped for. She’s brave but not all that reliable—another character calls her an “opium-riddled sack of shit.” “The Poppy War” mixes elements of Kuang’s family history with fictionalizations of the Nanjing Massacre and the Battle of Shanghai. But it’s also about democracy, nationalism, and the fallibility of popular will. The story, which continued in two subsequent books, is filled with big, messy teen-age emotions—from the longing for heroism to the insecurity of trying to measure up to your rivals—that have inspired readers to debate their favorite characters and write their own fan fiction.

    Kuang, who publishes under the name R. F. Kuang, has worked in an unpredictable range of styles and genres during the past ten years. In 2021, the “Poppy War” series was a finalist for a Hugo Award, which recognizes the best science-fiction and fantasy books. In 2022, Kuang published “Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution,” a playfully erudite work of speculative fiction, set in the eighteen-thirties, about the history of academia, the politics of translation, and the long arc of colonialism. She began working on it while she was a Marshall Scholar, in the midst of completing a master’s degree in contemporary Chinese studies at Oxford. “Babel” won the Nebula Award for best novel and was a Times best-seller. In 2023, she returned with “Yellowface,” a gossipy work of literary fiction about a white author navigating a cynical, identity-obsessed publishing industry in the era of Twitter beefs and social-media cancellations. It, too, was a best-seller. This month, Kuang will publish her sixth novel, “Katabasis,” and, while I was reporting this piece, she finished the first draft of another one, tentatively titled “Taipei Story.”

    Kuang, who recently turned twenty-nine, has also been pursuing a Ph.D. in East Asian languages and literatures at Yale, where she’s writing a dissertation on cultural capital and Asian diasporic writing. In April, I went to visit her, in New Haven, to talk about “Katabasis.” I’d never been so curious about another writer’s routines, habits, and time-management skills.

    We met at Atticus, a popular campus bookstore and coffee shop. Kuang lives in the Boston area with her husband, Bennett Eckert-Kuang, a Ph.D. student in philosophy at M.I.T. During the spring, she spent a few days a week in New Haven, teaching a writing course for undergraduates and meeting with her advisers and students.

    “I think I completely reinvent myself every few years,” Kuang told me. “I have different interests and different expressions and different priorities.” She speaks with a gentle, almost dazed curiosity, and poses ideas in terms of premises and theories, brightening whenever she has settled on a phrasing she likes. Her careful, coolly composed thoughts belie a mind that seeks constant stimulation. Looking back on the “Poppy War” trilogy or “Yellowface,” she explained, was like returning to “a version of myself that doesn’t exist,” and she discussed the choices she’d made in those books with a fond, if wary, distance.

    The current version of Kuang might be described as a tabula-rasa novice, a highly accomplished author who would prefer to be an eager disciple. “I think there is no attraction, for me, to being the most competent or well-read person in the room, because then there’s nowhere to go,” she told me. “I find starting at zero, that epistemic humility—I find that very useful.”

    Kuang is one of the most relaxed graduate students I’ve ever met, and I got the impression that this wasn’t only because of her relative financial security. Most people pursuing a Ph.D. feel panicked that they will never read enough. Kuang sees possibility instead, as though academia is meant to be constantly humbling. “I hate having my own mind for company,” she said. “I really love when someone else is the expert.”

    At the next table, undergraduates chatted at a distracting volume about Marxist theory, and, as they tried to outdo one another, I was reminded of the anxieties that drive “Katabasis.” Like “Babel,” Kuang’s new book can be classified in the genre of “dark academia,” a brooding, post-Hogwarts take on the campus novel which fetishizes Gothic architecture, houndstooth blazers, and dusty tomes. Even within these conventions, “Katabasis” has an extremely specific premise. It revolves around Alice Law and Peter Murdoch, two graduate students who venture to Hell to rescue their adviser Professor Grimes, who has recently died. He was a cruel mentor, yet they fear that they will never succeed on the job market without securing a letter of recommendation from him. The only way to make it to Hell without dying, though, is to master a series of logical paradoxes, and the rules governing this fictional underworld rely on both magic and a faint grasp of Plato and Aristotle.

    “Katabasis” is an effective satire of academic life. But there are very basic questions that Alice, a brilliant thinker and a rabidly box-ticking student, faces—and they feel like some that Kuang is contemplating herself. “What burns inside you? What fuels your every action? What gives you a reason to get up in the morning?” When Alice’s adviser asks these questions, she doesn’t have any good answers.

    Growing up outside of Dallas, Kuang was self-conscious about the way she spoke. “I just would not put air through my vocal cords,” she said. “I think I was just really, really scared.”

    Kuang’s parents, Eric and Janette, are from China, but they met in Orange County in 1989, when Eric was a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine. The couple returned to China in 1994, after Eric completed his Ph.D. Their first child, James, was born in Guangdong in 1995, and Rebecca was born the following year. “I struggled with my identity when I moved back,” Eric told me. “After five years in the U.S., after Tiananmen Square, I couldn’t find my place in China anymore.” In 2000, a year after Rebecca’s younger sister, Grace, was born, the Kuangs moved back to the U.S.

    Kuang was a quiet and studious child. One day, in middle school, she went to a meeting with the debate team from a local high school, which was recruiting future competitors. “We are champions,” Kuang recalled the coach saying to her class. The coach told them that he could spot the “winning mind-set” in students; Kuang felt that he was looking right at her. She was instantly entranced. She began competing in Lincoln-Douglas debate, a one-on-one style that focusses on the ethical implications of real-world issues, and her difficulties with speaking quickly disappeared. Debate suited her personality at the time: awkward, analytical, dutiful.

    The Dallas area was a hotbed of competitive debate, and, at first, the oratorical polish of Kuang’s teammates was intimidating. She spent months being coached on the art of the syllogism, a kind of logical argument in which one deduces a conclusion from a set of premises. “The idea that you could take something that seemed up to personal charisma or rhetorical choice and map it to this very rigid, argumentative structure was mind-blowing,” she said. At the highest levels, debate is a combination of politics and philosophy, and skilled debaters must master analytical reasoning and the ability to speak as fast as possible.

    “I know you’re my family, but I don’t find these visits comforting.”

    Cartoon by Tom Toro

    Kuang quickly distinguished herself, attending summer camps where top young debaters from around the country trained. After her first year of high school, she transferred to Greenhill School, a private academy outside Dallas which is a debate powerhouse. She routinely skipped class to research debate topics, a process that opened her eyes to issues like systemic racism and mass incarceration. The cloistered intensity of debate also came to define her social world. It was a period of “sustained obsession.” On her bedroom wall, she tacked up a group photograph from debate camp, and would look at it while thinking about everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. These were her greatest rivals, and her closest friends.

    I watched a YouTube video of Kuang at a debate tournament as a senior in high school. In such spaces, calm is the ultimate measure of swagger. “The term was ‘perceptual dominance,’ ” she told me. Her opponent was a noisy avalanche of language, but Kuang appeared cool and nonchalant. Having debated when I was in high school—though not at this level—I felt nervous as Kuang slowly rose to conduct her cross-examination. She was ruthless and precise, and she won the round by a unanimous decision. By most metrics, she was one of the most successful high-school debaters of that year.

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    Hua Hsu

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