La Regenta by Leopoldo Alas "Clarín"
Published 1885 · 340,000 words · about 30 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Classic Literature, Realism
How hard is La Regenta to read?
La Regenta scores 69 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: 70 out of 100
- A vast lexicon of ecclesiastical rank, provincial slang, legal terminology and free indirect discourse that shifts register with each character's mind.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Long, mobile sentences that slide between narrator and character without warning, in the manner Flaubert made available and Clarín extended.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Deeply concrete in its social detail, though the psychological analysis and the running argument about faith and provincial stagnation raise it well above plot.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- An entire city with dozens of named inhabitants, its clerical politics, its class structure and its gossip economy, sustained across a very long novel.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- Free indirect style keeps the reader inside minds that lie to themselves, and the narrator's irony is never announced.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- The cathedral tower, the telescope, the toad on the last page, and the theatre performance of Don Juan on the night of the dead do heavy structural work.
- Ironic distance: 84 out of 100
- Clarín's narrator maintains a cold, corrosive irony toward every pious phrase in the book, including the ones spoken sincerely.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The plot closes with a death and a public disgrace, but Ana is left conscious on a stone floor with no future indicated at all.
- Structural complexity: 64 out of 100
- Two symmetrical halves with radically different time scales, fifteen chapters covering three days and fifteen covering three years.
How La Regenta is regarded
La Regenta holds a literary regard score of 81 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.