Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga
Published 1988 · 110,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Short Stories, Magical Realism
How hard is Obabakoak to read?
Obabakoak scores 68 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: 52 out of 100
- Clear narrative prose with Basque place-names and rural vocabulary, and a register that shifts between fable, essay and reportage.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Direct, unshowy sentences suited to oral telling, with more elaborate construction in the essayistic interludes.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Concrete in its tales while running a continuous theoretical argument about originality, influence and the mechanics of storytelling.
- Information density: 64 out of 100
- Two dozen embedded stories, a critical apparatus about their sources, and a frame narrative, all in one volume.
- Narrative indirection: 76 out of 100
- Stories nest inside stories inside a frame, narrators hand off to one another, and the book keeps revealing that a tale was borrowed from somewhere else.
- Symbolic density: 64 out of 100
- The lizard that enters the ear and eats the brain, the class photograph and the village itself recur as a linked set of figures.
- Ironic distance: 74 out of 100
- The book cheerfully declares its own plagiarisms, publishes a method for mechanical story-generation, and undercuts each tale with the essay that follows it.
- Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
- The mystery of the boy in the photograph resolves into a fable rather than a fact, and the final section refuses to say which reading it endorses.
- Structural complexity: 82 out of 100
- Three parts of nested tales, framed by a weekend reading party and interleaved with essays on how the tales were made.
How Obabakoak is regarded
Obabakoak 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.