Ruined City by Jia Pingwa
Published 1993 · 230,000 words · about 20 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Satire
How hard is Ruined City to read?
Ruined City scores 66 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
- Thick Shaanxi dialect and Ming-vernacular pastiche, with classical allusion, calligraphy and antiques vocabulary throughout.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Long paratactic sentences in a deliberately archaic vernacular manner, easy line by line and cumulatively heavy.
- Abstraction: 54 out of 100
- Concerned with rooms, deals, bodies and objects, though the talking cow delivers explicit philosophical commentary at intervals.
- Information density: 66 out of 100
- A large cast of writers, officials, dealers and hangers-on, with a running commentary on antiques, calligraphy and local custom.
- Narrative indirection: 64 out of 100
- The famous deleted-character boxes make the novel's most talked-about content an absence the reader has to fill.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- The wandering cow, the ruined walls of the old capital and the writer who no longer writes are one sustained image of a culture eating its own past.
- Ironic distance: 76 out of 100
- The novel adopts the manner of a Ming erotic classic to describe a modern literary celebrity, and lets the borrowed form do the judging.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- Zhuang collapses in a railway station on the way out of the city and the book stops without telling us whether he lives.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- A long linear narrative interrupted by the cow's monologues and by the deletion boxes, which function as a structural device.
How Ruined City is regarded
Ruined City holds a literary regard score of 68 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.