That Long Silence by Shashi Deshpande
Published 1988 · 72,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Domestic Fiction
How hard is That Long Silence to read?
That Long Silence scores 58 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: 42 out of 100
- Plain educated Indian English with Sanskrit epic allusions—Sita, Draupadi, Gandhari—that Deshpande expects the reader to place.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Jaya's narration doubles back constantly, correcting itself mid-sentence, which slows the reading deliberately.
- Abstraction: 54 out of 100
- The book argues about what a woman owes a marriage, mostly through Jaya's attempts to talk herself out of the argument.
- Information density: 46 out of 100
- Bombay middle-class professional life, joint-family obligation, and the mechanics of a business fraud enquiry are assumed.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- Jaya is an unreliable narrator of her own life, editing herself the way she edited her fiction to keep her husband comfortable.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- Gandhari, who blindfolded herself for life because her husband was blind, is the figure Jaya keeps returning to and refusing.
- Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
- Jaya is a published writer who has spent seventeen years not saying anything, and Deshpande lets that sit without underlining it.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- Mohan sends a telegram, Jaya decides to speak, and the novel ends before we learn whether the marriage survives it.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- Present-tense confinement in a Dadar flat interleaved with memory reaching back to childhood, with no chapter signposting.
How That Long Silence is regarded
That Long Silence holds a literary regard score of 67 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.