Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah
Published 2013 · 38,000 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Modernist & Experimental Fiction
How hard is Untold Night and Day to read?
Untold Night and Day scores 42 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. 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: 30 out of 100
- Clear individual words but used in disorienting combinations. Literary and sensory vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Perception and consciousness are the subject. Reality and dream interpenetrate.
- Information density: 35 out of 100
- Short but concentrated. Each scene carries multiple possible meanings.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- No linear plot. Scenes connect by association. Characters may be the same person in different forms.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- The audio theater, blindness, night — recurring motifs without fixed meanings.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Contemplative and searching rather than ironic. Bae Suah's narration is earnest.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- No resolution in any conventional sense. The novel ends without closing.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- Dreamlike, non-linear structure. Scenes may be simultaneous, sequential, or imagined.
How Untold Night and Day is regarded
Untold Night and Day holds a literary regard score of 49 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.