Banana Trilogy by Miguel Ángel Asturias
Published 1950 · 13,000 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is Banana Trilogy to read?
Banana Trilogy scores 53 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
- Central American vocabulary, political terms.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Asturias's magical realist prose.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Colonialism and exploitation explored mythically.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with Guatemalan history.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Magic realism operates through indirection.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The banana, the company, the land carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Asturias's critique operates through myth.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Exploitation continues; hope fragile.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Three novels with overlapping themes.
How Banana Trilogy is regarded
Banana Trilogy holds a literary regard score of 60 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.