Beijing Coma by Ma Jian
Published 2008 · 250,000 words · about 22 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Political Fiction, Historical Fiction
How hard is Beijing Coma to read?
Beijing Coma scores 72 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very 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: 58 out of 100
- Extensive medical and anatomical vocabulary from inside a paralysed body, alongside student-movement and Party political terminology.
- Sentence structure: 56 out of 100
- Long interior passages that shift without warning between present sensation and remembered speech, with the two registers running into each other.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- An argument about political memory conducted through the physiology of an immobile body.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Seven weeks of the 1989 movement documented almost hour by hour with dozens of named students and factions, plus a decade of Beijing's transformation.
- Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100
- Narrated by a man in a coma who cannot verify anything he hears, with the past told in second-person address and the present in fragments.
- Symbolic density: 76 out of 100
- The paralysed body, the sparrow's nest, the demolition notice and the mother's madness form one sustained figure for a country that cannot move and cannot forget.
- Ironic distance: 70 out of 100
- A comatose man remembers everything while a functioning nation remembers nothing, and the novel keeps that inversion running for five hundred pages.
- Resolution withholding: 76 out of 100
- Whether he wakes, whether the building falls and what the movement was for are all left open at the last page.
- Structural complexity: 82 out of 100
- Two interleaved streams a decade apart, one in the second person, joined by anatomical passages that belong to neither.
How Beijing Coma is regarded
Beijing Coma holds a literary regard score of 65 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.