The Back Room by Carmen Martín Gaite
Published 1978 · 65,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Metafiction, Memoir
How hard is The Back Room to read?
The Back Room 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: 52 out of 100
- Conversational Spanish with period vocabulary from Francoist popular culture — songs, magazines, institutions — that carries the social argument.
- Sentence structure: 54 out of 100
- Fluid dialogue and digressive recollection in unhurried sentences, easy to read and hard to hold together.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Concrete recollection throughout, framed by an explicit argument about memory, genre and how a book gets written.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Forty years of Spanish social history delivered through personal detail, plus a running commentary on fantastic literature and Todorov's theory of it.
- Narrative indirection: 82 out of 100
- The interviewer may be a hallucination, a devil or the writer's own invention, and the novel never establishes which.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- The back room itself, the gold pillbox, the growing manuscript and the black-suited visitor operate as a coherent scheme about memory and creation.
- Ironic distance: 70 out of 100
- The book is a memoir of Francoism disguised as a fantastic tale, and its narrator keeps pointing out that she is doing this.
- Resolution withholding: 84 out of 100
- The visitor's identity, the origin of the manuscript and the status of the whole night are all left permanently unexplained.
- Structural complexity: 76 out of 100
- A single night's frame containing non-chronological recollection, with a self-generating text that turns out to be the book in the reader's hands.
How The Back Room is regarded
The Back Room holds a literary regard score of 71 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.