Frontier by Can Xue
Published 2008 · 115,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Fantasy
How hard is Frontier to read?
Frontier scores 74 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: 54 out of 100
- Ordinary words used in ways that do not settle; the difficulty is not lexical but that nouns behave unreliably.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Clear, flat sentences whose plainness makes the impossible content harder rather than easier to place.
- Abstraction: 76 out of 100
- The book operates on states of perception rather than events, and refuses to anchor its images in a stable world.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Sparse in fact and crowded with incident, with twelve viewpoints and a setting that changes its own rules.
- Narrative indirection: 88 out of 100
- Twelve rotating viewpoints in a place where nothing is explained, and no narrator ever confirms what has happened.
- Symbolic density: 84 out of 100
- The snow mountain, the Design Institute and the garden operate as symbols with no fixed referent, which is Can Xue's stated method.
- Ironic distance: 56 out of 100
- Characters discuss impossible events in the tone of neighbours discussing the weather, and the flatness is the joke.
- Resolution withholding: 92 out of 100
- Nothing is resolved, nothing is explained, and the novel ends with the frontier as unentered as it was on the first page.
- Structural complexity: 82 out of 100
- Twelve chapters rotating between characters in a setting with no consistent physics, chronology or causality.
How Frontier is regarded
Frontier holds a literary regard score of 64 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.