A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle
Published 1989 · 241 pages · 70,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Memoir & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Satire & Humor, Travel & Food
How hard is A Year in Provence to read?
A Year in Provence scores 13 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. 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: 22 out of 100
- French food terms. Accessible and entertaining.
- Sentence structure: 22 out of 100
- Abstraction: 12 out of 100
- Entirely concrete. Food, weather, builders, neighbors.
- Information density: 32 out of 100
- Anecdotal and charming. Not dense.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Month by month. Perfectly linear.
- Symbolic density: 80 out of 100
- Provence as paradise. Light symbolism.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Self-deprecating English humor in French setting.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Each month resolves. Year ends happily.
- Structural complexity: 100 out of 100
- Twelve chapters. One per month.
How A Year in Provence is regarded
A Year in Provence holds a literary regard score of 35 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.