Family by Ba Jin
Published 1933 · 140,000 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Classic Literature
How hard is Family to read?
Family scores 41 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: 42 out of 100
- Deliberately accessible modern vernacular; Ba Jin wrote for students and kept the diction simple, with kinship terms doing the specialised work.
- Sentence structure: 36 out of 100
- Short, plain sentences with heavy dialogue, one of the easiest major novels of the period to read in Chinese.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Ideas arrive as things characters read and argue about rather than as authorial argument, and the moral position is unmistakable.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- A large extended family whose hierarchy must be tracked, but the material is presented at a generous pace.
- Narrative indirection: 32 out of 100
- The narration tells the reader exactly who is right, and the sympathies are declared from the first chapter.
- Symbolic density: 48 out of 100
- The compound gate, the lake and the sedan chair carry the theme, but the novel prefers direct statement to figure.
- Ironic distance: 38 out of 100
- Written in earnest and at speed; the closest it comes to irony is Juexin's habit of agreeing with everyone who is destroying him.
- Resolution withholding: 44 out of 100
- Juehui escapes on a boat, but nothing is settled for those who stay, and the deaths are given no consolation.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Linear chronological narrative moving between three brothers, with no formal experiment.
How Family is regarded
Family holds a literary regard score of 78 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.