Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano
Published 2006 · 320 pages · 95,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, True Crime, Investigative Journalism
How hard is Gomorrah to read?
Gomorrah scores 63 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: 54 out of 100
- Business and legal vocabulary — logistics, shell companies, waste-disposal licensing, judicial procedure — mixed with Neapolitan clan terminology that the translation keeps and glosses lightly.
- Sentence structure: 56 out of 100
- Long, driving sentences that accumulate clauses under pressure, alternating with hard short paragraphs of statistic and name.
- Abstraction: 64 out of 100
- The reporting keeps returning to a general economic argument about how organised crime functions as a logistics and investment business rather than as a criminal subculture.
- Information density: 82 out of 100
- Extremely dense: clan genealogies, court transcripts, tonnages, prices, dozens of named figures on both sides, and a geography of Campania that the reader is expected to hold across chapters.
- Narrative indirection: 54 out of 100
- Saviano writes in the first person and states his conclusions, but the book slides between documented investigation and reconstructed scene without marking the boundary, which is the ground of every attack on it.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The split container, the Angelina Jolie dress made in a Casertano basement, the waste buried under the new roads, and the title's biblical city carry the argument beyond its facts.
- Ironic distance: 66 out of 100
- The book's method is to describe atrocity in the register of a business-school case study — margins, supply chains, market share — and let the vocabulary do the condemning.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- No arrests conclude anything, the system absorbs every prosecution, and the book ends with the author on the sea near his ruined coast, saying he wants to keep writing and does not know how.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- Twelve thematic chapters — port, tailoring, concrete, waste, war, Hollywood — rather than a narrative, with the author appearing and disappearing and time moving freely across two decades.
How Gomorrah is regarded
Gomorrah holds a literary regard score of 67 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.