Big Breasts and Wide Hips by Mo Yan
Published 1995 · 636 pages · 214,879 words · about 14 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is Big Breasts and Wide Hips to read?
Big Breasts and Wide Hips scores 52 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
- Mo Yan's vocabulary in translation, Chinese history.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Long, flowing narrative sentences.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Chinese history through one family.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Dense with 20th-century Chinese history.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Multiple perspectives and time.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The mother, the body, China carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Mo Yan's satire and sympathy intertwine.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- History continues; survival.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Epic family saga across century.
How Big Breasts and Wide Hips is regarded
Big Breasts and Wide Hips holds a literary regard score of 69 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.