Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval
Published 2009 · 40,700 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Modernist & Experimental Fiction, LGBTQ+ Fiction
How hard is Paradise Rot to read?
Paradise Rot 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: 52 out of 100
- Precise, bodily vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Short, strange sentences.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Bodies and buildings treated as one figure.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Light on event.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- A narrator whose perception is visibly unreliable.
- Symbolic density: 75 out of 100
- The rot, the apples and the brewery are all figurative.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Some distance between what she describes and what is happening.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- Nothing is explained.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- Linear but dreamlike.
How Paradise Rot is regarded
Paradise Rot holds a literary regard score of 38 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.