Tales of Hulan River by Xiao Hong
Published 1942 · 65,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Autobiography, Classic Literature
How hard is Tales of Hulan River to read?
Tales of Hulan River scores 62 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: 48 out of 100
- Northeastern small-town vocabulary of trades, festivals, folk religion and exorcism, all in a deliberately simple word stock.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Short repetitive sentences imitating a child's telling, with insistent repetition used as rhythm.
- Abstraction: 44 out of 100
- Concrete scenes throughout; the argument about how a community kills people by ritual and good intention is never stated.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- A whole town's customs and cast are laid out, though slowly and with room around them.
- Narrative indirection: 66 out of 100
- An adult narrator uses a child's eye, so the worst events are reported without comment and the reader supplies the judgement.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- The mud hole nobody fills in and the paper effigies more beautiful than anything the living have carry the book's view of the place.
- Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
- The child bride is boiled alive by people the narrator describes as kind and helpful, and the tone does not change.
- Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
- The book closes with a list of what became of the garden and the people in it, most of them unknown, and refuses any summation.
- Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
- Seven chapters that begin as town survey, become memoir and end as three separate biographies, held together by association rather than plot.
How Tales of Hulan River is regarded
Tales of Hulan River holds a literary regard score of 76 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.