All That Man Is by David Szalay
Published 2016 · 432 pages · 108,000 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Short Fiction
How hard is All That Man Is to read?
All That Man Is scores 50 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: 40 out of 100
- European locations with varied cultural vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Varied by story; each matches protagonist.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Questions of masculinity and European identity.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with European settings and male psychology.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Nine stories build thematic meaning together.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- Europe, masculinity, aging carry symbolic weight.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Szalay's irony toward his male subjects sustained.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Each story ends unresolved; decline continues.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Nine linked novellas ascending in age.
How All That Man Is is regarded
All That Man Is 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.