The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor
Published 1998 · 480 pages · 120,000 words · about 13 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Bear Comes Home to read?
The Bear Comes Home scores 57 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
- Jazz vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Zabor's flowing prose.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Art, identity, love.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Jazz world detail.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Third person, fantastical.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- Bear, jazz, freedom.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Fabulist distance.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Bear's fate.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Picaresque jazz.
How The Bear Comes Home is regarded
The Bear Comes Home holds a literary regard score of 58 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.