Miau by Benito Pérez Galdós
Published 1888 · 95,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Classic Literature, Satire
How hard is Miau to read?
Miau scores 60 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: 58 out of 100
- Administrative and financial jargon of the nineteenth-century Spanish civil service alongside domestic Madrid speech and a child's imagined theology.
- Sentence structure: 54 out of 100
- Fluid realist prose with extensive dialogue and stretches of free indirect discourse inside a disintegrating mind.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Grounded entirely in offices, meals and debts, with abstraction appearing only in the boy's visions and the final monologue.
- Information density: 66 out of 100
- The Spanish budget system, ministerial patronage, household accounts and a large neighbourhood cast are tracked across a long novel.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- The child's conversations with God run alongside the realist narrative without explanation, leaving their status permanently unsettled.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- The cat faces of the title, the unread reform memorandum and the boy's God who admits He cannot fix the civil service work as a single satirical scheme.
- Ironic distance: 82 out of 100
- Galdós narrates a man's destruction in the tone of an office comedy, and the family's obsession with appearances is played for laughs to the last chapter.
- Resolution withholding: 56 out of 100
- The suicide is definite, but the novel declines to say whether Villaamil's final calm is madness, liberation or clarity.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- Chronological narration alternating between the ministry, the household and the boy's visionary passages.
How Miau is regarded
Miau holds a literary regard score of 73 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.