Aliens & Anorexia by Chris Kraus
Published 2000 · 244 pages · 67,100 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Memoir & Autobiography, Modernist & Experimental Fiction
How hard is Aliens & Anorexia to read?
Aliens & Anorexia scores 66 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
- A hybrid of art criticism, philosophy and confession that draws on Simone Weil and Büchner's Lenz suggests an educated, theory-aware register, though not the invented language of Pynchon. The vocabulary sits between The Great Gatsby and Notes from Underground.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Essayistic, polemical prose from a Semiotext(e) writer likely runs to long argumentative sentences, but the form stays navigable. It sits near Notes from Underground in demand.
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- Weil, anorexia as an exit from the body, and art and culture as subjects make ideas the main business. This puts it close to Notes from Underground in abstraction, with personal anecdote grounding it.
- Information density: 66 out of 100
- The nested Chinese-box structure folds in real figures such as Weil and Thek along with Kraus's own life and a virtual S/M partner. It is dense in references, comparable to Flights' compressed fragments.
- Narrative indirection: 76 out of 100
- Real and invented figures blend, and the maze that spirals back on itself makes the reader assemble the meaning. Blending fiction, memoir and criticism requires inference, as in Flights.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Anorexia as an attempt to leave the body and the Büchner shadow suggest metaphor carries real weight. The book still argues openly rather than building allegory, so it sits below Flights.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Kraus places herself inside the book as a character, and the polemics mix confession with cultural critique, which opens a gap between statement and intent. The tone is less satirical than Lolita or Dead Souls.
- Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
- A maze that spirals back on itself resists closure, in the way Flights leaves its threads open. The essay form suggests no neat resolution.
- Structural complexity: 74 out of 100
- Chinese boxes and spiraling polemical narratives make nesting the book's organizing principle. It is less fragmented than Flights' 116 pieces but clearly experimental.
How Aliens & Anorexia is regarded
Aliens & Anorexia holds a literary regard score of 48 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.