Baotown by Wang Anyi
Published 1985 · 45,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Baotown to read?
Baotown scores 61 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: 46 out of 100
- Rural Anhui speech and the vocabulary of official model-worker campaigns, both plain and concrete.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Short declarative sentences in numbered sections, with a deliberately flattened storyteller's rhythm.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- The argument about how myths get manufactured is enacted rather than stated, though the mechanism is laid out plainly.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- A village-sized cast introduced quickly, with the local kinship and flood history assumed.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- The narration moves between villagers with no guide, and the official version of Dregs's death is reported in the same neutral tone as the events it distorts.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The flood, the ancestral story about controlling the waters and the boy who drowns in them are one figure, folded together without comment.
- Ironic distance: 82 out of 100
- A child nobody fed becomes a national model of filial devotion, and everyone who profits from it is described with complete sympathy.
- Resolution withholding: 64 out of 100
- The legend hardens, the beneficiaries prosper, and the novel declines to say what any of it was worth.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- Short numbered sections rotating between households, with time handled loosely and no single protagonist until late.
How Baotown is regarded
Baotown holds a literary regard score of 69 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.