The Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Wang Anyi
Published 1995 · 180,000 words · about 15 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
How hard is The Song of Everlasting Sorrow to read?
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow scores 61 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: 58 out of 100
- Shanghai lane-house vocabulary, forty years of shifting political and commercial terms, and long descriptive passages built on precise material nouns.
- Sentence structure: 64 out of 100
- Long accumulative sentences, especially in the opening set pieces, that pile clause on clause without event.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- The city is treated as a character and analysed at length in essayistic passages before any person appears.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Four decades of Shanghai social history carried in domestic detail — what people ate, wore and could safely say — rather than explained.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Politics reaches the novel only as changes in furniture and conversation, and the reader must date events from what is not being discussed.
- Symbolic density: 66 out of 100
- The longtang alleys, the pigeons, the charcoal stove and the box of gold bars organise the book as a sustained figure for what a city keeps.
- Ironic distance: 64 out of 100
- A woman who won third place in 1946 is murdered in 1986 for the gold a dead man gave her, and the novel presents the forty years between as ordinary.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The murder is offhand and unexplained, and the novel refuses to make it the meaning of the life it has spent six hundred pages describing.
- Structural complexity: 56 out of 100
- Three parts across forty years with a long impersonal overture, chronological but very unevenly paced.
How The Song of Everlasting Sorrow is regarded
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow 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.