My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel
Published 2003 · 46,750 words · about 4 hours at an average pace
How hard is My Tender Matador to read?
My Tender Matador scores 60 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
- Camp Chilean slang against boleros and political jargon.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Long, baroque, deliberately excessive sentences.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Concrete Santiago carrying a political allegory.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Dense with period reference.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- Free indirect style sliding between the Queen and Pinochet himself.
- Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
- The embroidery, the tablecloth and the songs all carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 68 out of 100
- Camp irony sustained against real terror.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- The romance ends unresolved; the politics do not.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Alternating registers with no warning.
How My Tender Matador is regarded
My Tender Matador holds a literary regard score of 54 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.