Return to Región by Juan Benet
Published 1967 · 95,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Modernist Fiction
How hard is Return to Región to read?
Return to Región scores 86 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. 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: 86 out of 100
- Geological, botanical, military and legal vocabulary deployed with engineering precision, alongside deliberately archaic and Latinate constructions.
- Sentence structure: 96 out of 100
- Sentences that run for pages with nested subordination, parenthetical qualification and verbs suspended almost past recovery.
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- The narrative is buried under a continuous meditation on time, decay and the impossibility of return, delivered in essayistic digression.
- Information density: 84 out of 100
- An invented region's full geography, history, war record and genealogy, delivered obliquely and never summarised.
- Narrative indirection: 92 out of 100
- Everything arrives through two unreliable speakers who talk past each other, with events referred to before they are explained and often never explained.
- Symbolic density: 80 out of 100
- Numa the invisible guardian, the sealed valley, the ruined mines and the card game function as a closed allegorical system for postwar Spain.
- Ironic distance: 70 out of 100
- The narrator's magisterial, quasi-scientific tone is applied to a place and a history that have entirely disintegrated.
- Resolution withholding: 94 out of 100
- Nothing is found, nothing is explained, the conversation ends in gunfire that the text declines to describe, and the region remains sealed.
- Structural complexity: 90 out of 100
- Four parts of overlapping monologue with no chronology, no scene-setting and no reliable indication of who is speaking.
How Return to Región is regarded
Return to Región 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.