Call to Arms by Lu Xun
Published 1923 · 443 pages · 50,585 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Short Fiction
How hard is Call to Arms to read?
Call to Arms scores 63 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: 55 out of 100
- Vernacular Chinese accessible to modern readers; Lu Xun writes with clarity.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Direct prose style; modernist techniques in "Diary of a Madman."
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- Allegory and metaphor carry social critique; cannibalism is not literal.
- Information density: 65 out of 100
- Short stories packed with implication; every detail counts.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- The madman may be sane; Ah Q's perspective is unreliable; meaning requires interpretation.
- Symbolic density: 75 out of 100
- Cannibalism, the iron house, medicine made from blood—charged symbolic content.
- Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
- Savage irony throughout; Lu Xun's anger emerges as dark comedy.
- Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
- Stories end ambiguously; "save the children" is a cry, not a solution.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Short story collection; individual stories are compact and focused.
How Call to Arms is regarded
Call to Arms holds a literary regard score of 86 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.