A Luminous Republic by Andrés Barba

Published 2020 · 58,025 words · about 4 hours at an average pace

How hard is A Luminous Republic to read?

A Luminous Republic scores 62 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
Formal Spanish, precisely translated.
Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
Controlled, cool sentences.
Abstraction: 62 out of 100
Concrete events carrying a political allegory.
Information density: 55 out of 100
Moderate.
Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
An official recounting his own failure twenty years later.
Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
The children and the jungle are sustained figures.
Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
Steady distance between his account and his conduct.
Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
What the children were is never explained.
Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
A retrospective official account.

How A Luminous Republic is regarded

A Luminous Republic holds a literary regard score of 40 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

About the author

Andrés Barba