The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
Published 1962 · 102,437 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is The Death of Artemio Cruz to read?
The Death of Artemio Cruz scores 64 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: 58 out of 100
- Literary Spanish with historical and political vocabulary; modernist passages are dense.
- Sentence structure: 70 out of 100
- Stream of consciousness, shifting pronouns, fragmented syntax.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Political and moral themes grounded in specific Mexican history.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Non-linear structure requires piecing together; dense passages alternate with lucid ones.
- Narrative indirection: 75 out of 100
- Three grammatical persons, scrambled time; meaning emerges gradually.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The body, the mirror, the revolution—symbols of Mexico's condition.
- Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
- Distance from Cruz's self-justifications; the novel sees through him.
- Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
- Death is certain; the moral meaning of Cruz's life is clear if damning.
- Structural complexity: 80 out of 100
- Three narrative strands, scrambled chronology, twelve I/you/he cycles.
How The Death of Artemio Cruz is regarded
The Death of Artemio Cruz 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.