The City of Marvels by Eduardo Mendoza
Published 1986 · 170,000 words · about 14 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
How hard is The City of Marvels to read?
The City of Marvels scores 64 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: 58 out of 100
- A wide range of period vocabulary — construction, anarchism, finance, early cinema — handled in an easy, ironic narrative register.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Long, digressive, comma-heavy sentences in a nineteenth-century narrator's manner, used deliberately as pastiche.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Concrete and event-driven, with its argument about capital and cities carried by the plot rather than stated.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Forty years of Barcelona's political, architectural and criminal history, with dozens of subsidiary figures and constant historical digression.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- A knowing, unreliable narrator mixes documented history with invention and legend and never signals which is which.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The two exhibitions that frame the book, the sewers under the city, and the flying machine at the end work as a scheme for a century of Barcelona.
- Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
- The narrator's mock-encyclopaedic authority is applied identically to the price of cement and to a levitating priest, keeping the whole book at a deadpan angle.
- Resolution withholding: 64 out of 100
- Onofre's disappearance is reported in several contradictory versions and the novel declines to choose among them.
- Structural complexity: 64 out of 100
- Seven parts alternating between a linear career and long historical excursuses, with the narrator's mode shifting between chronicle and tall tale.
How The City of Marvels is regarded
The City of Marvels holds a literary regard score of 68 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.