Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich
Published 2021 · 52,800 words · about 4 hours at an average pace
How hard is Last Summer in the City to read?
Last Summer in the City scores 54 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: 52 out of 100
- Clear Italian, well translated.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Long, drifting sentences.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Concrete Rome, elegiac in register.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Light on event.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- A narrator recalling a summer he cannot account for.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The city itself carries the weight.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- Distance between his self-deprecation and his self-pity.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The ending offers no explanation.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- A retrospective drift.
How Last Summer in the City is regarded
Last Summer in the City holds a literary regard score of 39 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.