Abundance by Jakob Guanzon
Published 2021 · 314 pages · 108,000 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Abundance to read?
Abundance scores 42 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. 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: 38 out of 100
- Historical vocabulary of Marie Antoinette's France.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Flowing sentences recreating 18th-century world.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Historical drama with themes of power and isolation.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with Versailles detail and French Revolution.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- First-person Marie Antoinette with limited perspective.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- Versailles, abundance, the Revolution all symbolic.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Naslund maintains sympathy while showing blindness.
- Resolution withholding: 35 out of 100
- Historical ending is known; tragedy unfolds.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- First-person historical narrative.
How Abundance is regarded
Abundance holds a literary regard score of 55 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.