Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling
Published 1766 · 250,000 words · about 21 hours at an average pace · Short Stories, Fantasy, Classic Literature
How hard is Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio to read?
Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio 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: 74 out of 100
- Terse classical Chinese, rendered into English dense with Qing official titles, degree names, ritual objects and Daoist vocabulary that the notes have to gloss.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Sentences are short and declarative; the difficulty is elliptical compression rather than nesting, with subjects and connectives left out.
- Abstraction: 44 out of 100
- Almost everything is concrete — a cricket, a pear tree, a painted wall — though the stories carry unstated arguments about justice and desire.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Each tale packs a full social situation, several characters and a reversal into two or three pages, and assumes the reader knows how examinations, concubinage and burial worked.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- A story is often told at second or third hand, attributed to a named informant, and Pu Songling's closing comment frequently disagrees with the tale it follows.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- Fox spirits, ghost brides and painted women are figures for examination failure, sexual anxiety and the poverty of the provincial scholar, and Pu Songling never says so.
- Ironic distance: 78 out of 100
- The dead and the animals behave better than the magistrates; the joke is structural and runs the length of the collection.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- Many tales stop dead after a reversal, and the author's comment often raises a question rather than settling one.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- A collection of independent short tales with no frame narrative, though the ordering of any given translation is the translator's rather than the author's.
How Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is regarded
Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio holds a literary regard score of 84 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.