A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman
Published 2017 · 201 pages · 62,980 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is A Horse Walks into a Bar to read?
A Horse Walks into a Bar scores 48 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately 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: 35 out of 100
- Contemporary Hebrew in translation, stand-up comedy vernacular.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Fragmented comedy routine rhythms punctuated by audience reactions.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Questions of memory, trauma, performance emerge through comedy.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- One night, but past and present layer densely.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Truth emerges through misdirection and gradual revelation.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The comedy club, the childhood choice become symbols of Israeli trauma.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Comedy and tragedy intertwine; laughter as defense mechanism.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Core revelation comes but what it means remains with reader.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- One evening with flashbacks woven through performance.
How A Horse Walks into a Bar is regarded
A Horse Walks into a Bar holds a literary regard score of 59 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.
Prizes
- International Booker Prize 2017, winner
Where the story of A Horse Walks into a Bar takes place
- Netanya, Israel, the 2010s (2010 to 2017), the main setting