Cries in the Drizzle by Yu Hua
Published 1991 · 105,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Cries in the Drizzle to read?
Cries in the Drizzle scores 63 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: 44 out of 100
- Deliberately plain modern Chinese with rural detail; Yu Hua's word stock is famously restricted.
- Sentence structure: 46 out of 100
- Clear, level sentences whose flatness against horrific content is the point.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Stays with scenes and bodies, though the narrator's reflections on memory and time are explicit.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Three generations and two villages, distributed across a non-chronological structure that requires the reader to reassemble the family.
- Narrative indirection: 76 out of 100
- An adult narrator reconstructs his childhood by association, disclosing deaths long before their causes and withholding the reasons for his own exile.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The rain, the river and the cries of the title recur, but Yu Hua trusts incident more than figure.
- Ironic distance: 68 out of 100
- Brutality is narrated in the same tone as breakfast, and the narrator's calm is the source of the book's force.
- Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
- The family disperses, the friends die, and the narrator's own future is never given.
- Structural complexity: 76 out of 100
- Four parts moving freely across thirty years and three generations by association rather than chronology, with the same events returned to from different distances.
How Cries in the Drizzle is regarded
Cries in the Drizzle holds a literary regard score of 67 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.