A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector
Published 1978 · 60,500 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Modernist & Experimental Fiction
How hard is A Breath of Life to read?
A Breath of Life scores 75 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: 62 out of 100
- Ordinary words pushed to breaking point.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Fragmentary, often ungrammatical by design.
- Abstraction: 92 out of 100
- Among the most abstract novels there is — being itself is the subject.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Light on event, heavy on thought.
- Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100
- An author and his character argue about who is speaking.
- Symbolic density: 78 out of 100
- Almost everything is figurative.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- The author-figure undercuts himself continually.
- Resolution withholding: 88 out of 100
- Nothing resolves; the book refuses narrative entirely.
- Structural complexity: 85 out of 100
- A dialogue with no plot, published posthumously from fragments.
How A Breath of Life is regarded
A Breath of Life holds a literary regard score of 63 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.