Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga
Published 2011 · 135,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Social Realism
How hard is Last Man in Tower to read?
Last Man in Tower scores 51 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: 42 out of 100
- Direct contemporary English with Mumbai real-estate jargon and Bombay Hindi thrown in unglossed.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Short punchy sentences, heavy dialogue, occasional lists of building rules and notices.
- Abstraction: 44 out of 100
- A concrete plot about a demolition offer carries an argument about how ordinary decency dissolves under money.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Mumbai's redevelopment law, cooperative-society voting rules, and Vakola geography are laid out with reporter's precision.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Adiga rotates through the tower's residents so that Masterji is seen mostly from outside, and his stubbornness is never explained from within.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- Vishram Society, built for respectable Bombay in 1959 and now cracking in the monsoon, is the whole argument in concrete.
- Ironic distance: 68 out of 100
- The neighbours who love Masterji reason their way to killing him in perfectly reasonable committee language.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- The police close the case as a fall; Adiga ends on the building's future rather than on justice.
- Structural complexity: 46 out of 100
- Linear, structured by the developer's deadline, with the viewpoint passing around the residents.
How Last Man in Tower is regarded
Last Man in Tower holds a literary regard score of 54 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.