My Century by Aleksander Wat
Published 1977 · 200,000 words · about 18 hours at an average pace · Memoir, Nonfiction, History
How hard is My Century to read?
My Century scores 70 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: 62 out of 100
- Spoken Polish carrying an enormous freight of Marxist, literary and philosophical terminology, plus Russian and prison vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Transcribed speech with the digressions, self-corrections and unfinished sentences of a man thinking aloud over months.
- Abstraction: 76 out of 100
- Continuous theoretical reflection on ideology, evil and the psychology of belief, arising from concrete memory.
- Information density: 88 out of 100
- Hundreds of named figures across Polish, Russian and Soviet cultural and political life, with no orientation offered to the reader.
- Narrative indirection: 70 out of 100
- The account is spoken, associative and non-chronological, and the interlocutor's questions are largely edited out.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- Recurring figures — the cell, the pill, the Lubyanka corridor — accumulate weight, though the book works by testimony rather than image.
- Ironic distance: 72 out of 100
- Wat examines his younger self's revolutionary enthusiasm with a merciless and often funny detachment.
- Resolution withholding: 78 out of 100
- He never resolves whether his conversion was genuine, never accounts fully for his own complicity, and the recordings stop rather than conclude.
- Structural complexity: 72 out of 100
- An edited oral transcript in non-chronological order, assembled posthumously from tapes by a second author.
How My Century is regarded
My Century 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.