The August Sleepwalker by Bei Dao
Published 1988 · 16,000 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Poetry, Political Fiction
How hard is The August Sleepwalker to read?
The August Sleepwalker scores 71 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: 56 out of 100
- Ordinary modern Chinese words used against their usual sense; the difficulty is not lexical but the political weight loaded onto plain nouns.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Fragmentary lines with dropped connectives and unmarked shifts of subject, so grammatical relations have to be guessed.
- Abstraction: 76 out of 100
- Images are cut loose from any situation and used as counters for belief, history and complicity.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Short poems, but each depends on Cultural Revolution history and on what could not be said in Beijing in 1978.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- Obscurity was a working method under censorship; the poems refuse to name their occasions and the reader is required to decode them.
- Symbolic density: 84 out of 100
- Net, wall, bell, ice, shadow and the word answer recur as a private symbolic vocabulary carrying the entire political argument.
- Ironic distance: 72 out of 100
- Official slogans are quoted and turned inside out, and the flat declarative tone is aimed at a state that used the same tone.
- Resolution withholding: 78 out of 100
- The poems end in negation or a held image, and the title poem's sleepwalking is never resolved into waking.
- Structural complexity: 56 out of 100
- Independent short lyrics collected across a decade, whose ordering follows publication rather than any designed sequence.
How The August Sleepwalker is regarded
The August Sleepwalker holds a literary regard score of 74 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.