Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong
Published 2004 · 210,000 words · about 17 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Nature
How hard is Wolf Totem to read?
Wolf Totem scores 55 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: 56 out of 100
- Mongol grassland vocabulary of herding, wolf hunting, yurts and steppe ecology, plus Cultural Revolution production-brigade terminology.
- Sentence structure: 46 out of 100
- Plain narrative prose with long expository speeches, written for a mass readership.
- Abstraction: 64 out of 100
- The ecological and national-character thesis is argued explicitly by characters and again in an appended essay.
- Information density: 66 out of 100
- Sustained detail on wolf behaviour, grassland ecology, Mongol custom and brigade politics, delivered as instruction.
- Narrative indirection: 42 out of 100
- A single close third-person viewpoint with the argument stated openly and repeatedly.
- Symbolic density: 66 out of 100
- The wolf, the totem and the chained cub carry the thesis, and the cub's mutilation quietly contradicts everything the narrator says he believes.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- The man who argues for the wolf's freedom keeps one on a chain and files its teeth down, a contradiction the book stages without commenting on.
- Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
- The epilogue delivers the desert and the sandstorms, but leaves the political argument deliberately unfinished.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- A long chronological narrative in one location with an essayistic epilogue attached.
How Wolf Totem is regarded
Wolf Totem holds a literary regard score of 62 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.