Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
Published 2018 · 229 pages · 62,975 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Magical Realism, Postcolonial Literature
How hard is Freshwater to read?
Freshwater scores 53 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: 38 out of 100
- Emezi writes in plain, lyrical English seasoned with Igbo terms like ogbanje and little specialist jargon. The vocabulary sits closer to Beach Read than to Midnight's Children, with the Igbo words the main unfamiliar element.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Sentences run short and declarative, then stretch into incantatory lists and prayers. The syntax is more varied than The Remains of the Day but never approaches Faulkner's nesting.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Selfhood, spirit and the body carry the book's ideas, though they arrive through concrete events like Ada's assault and her tattoos. It is more abstract than The Great Gatsby's social observation but grounded in bodily scenes.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- At roughly 63,000 words in short chapters, the book moves quickly and does not pile up facts. Each chapter adds a shift in spirit or setting, which puts it near The Great Gatsby in compression.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- The spirits narrate as we, and the reader must work out who speaks and how far to trust the account. It is more indirect than Beloved, though it states its core events plainly.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- Water, thresholds, shrines and the ogbanje carry meaning throughout, but the spirits are also treated as literal. The density sits between The Great Gatsby and Doctor Zhivago.
- Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
- The spirits speak with sincerity and sometimes dark wit, with little gap between what they say and what the book means. It is closer to It Ends with Us in directness, with a touch more edge.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Ada's plurality is not resolved into a single self, and the ending offers acceptance rather than cure. It leaves more open than Beloved but less than The Great Gatsby's open meaning.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- Short chapters shift between narrators, times and registers, with letters and invocations among them. The structure is more fragmented than Beloved but far less intricate than Flights.
How Freshwater is regarded
Freshwater holds a literary regard score of 58 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.
Prizes
- Women's Prize for Fiction 2019, longlist