The Truth about the Savolta Case by Eduardo Mendoza
Published 1975 · 115,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Crime
How hard is The Truth about the Savolta Case to read?
The Truth about the Savolta Case scores 73 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: 60 out of 100
- Legal, commercial and journalistic registers reproduced exactly, each with its own vocabulary, alongside period Barcelona speech.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Deliberate pastiche of document styles — deposition, police report, newspaper prose — with abrupt shifts between them and long parenthetical testimony.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Concrete in its events and settings, with the argument about truth and testimony arising from the form.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- A large cast, two timeframes, the industrial and union politics of wartime Barcelona, and a mass of documentary material to be reconciled.
- Narrative indirection: 84 out of 100
- Everything arrives through documents and depositions by interested parties, and the reader must reconstruct events the novel never narrates directly.
- Symbolic density: 54 out of 100
- The arms factory, the acrobat passed from hand to hand, and the burned archive stand in for the whole arrangement without being pressed.
- Ironic distance: 76 out of 100
- The title's promise of truth is contradicted by every page, and the courtroom's confident procedure is set against a case nobody intends to solve.
- Resolution withholding: 86 out of 100
- The case is never solved, the deposition ends inconclusively, and the reader is left with incompatible accounts and no adjudication.
- Structural complexity: 84 out of 100
- Non-chronological assembly of depositions, reports, clippings and first-person narrative across two decades, with no organising narrator.
How The Truth about the Savolta Case is regarded
The Truth about the Savolta Case holds a literary regard score of 72 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.