After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
Published 2022 · 237 pages · 63,467 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is After Sappho to read?
After Sappho scores 74 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: 72 out of 100
- Schwartz deploys French (chansons vécues, tribadismo, saffismo, Odéonia), Greek (aorist tense, beudos, aithus-somenon, pannuchides), and Italian legal terminology (Pisanelli Code, jus sanguinis, portantini) throughout. Classical allusions to Sappho's fragments require familiarity with the scholarly apparatus Anne Carson built around them. Not as lexically extreme as Ulysses, but readers without some grounding in European literary and feminist history will reach frequently for footnotes.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Sentences range from spare declaratives to long subordinate chains with embedded quotation. The prose is rhythmic and lyrical — closer to Woolf's essayistic register than to Jamesian hypotaxis — but the paragraphs are dense and rarely relent. Most micro-chapters hold a reader through careful accumulation rather than grammatical difficulty; syntactically demanding but navigable.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- The novel moves fluidly between historical event and philosophical meditation on naming, selfhood, genre, and legal personhood. Passages like 'in French genre means both gender and the form of a book' treat abstract categories as the novel's primary subject matter. Historical anecdotes anchor the text but exist to carry theoretical weight, placing it closer to Woolf's essays than to conventional fiction.
- Information density: 75 out of 100
- Each micro-chapter introduces new historical figures, legal codes, feminist manifestos, scholarly debates, and Sapphic fragments simultaneously. The novel cross-references Italian criminal law, Greek prosody, French avant-garde salons, British suffrage debates, and modernist literary history within the same page. The extensive notes section confirms how many layers of sourcing underpin every paragraph.
- Narrative indirection: 82 out of 100
- The collective first-person plural 'we' never identifies itself; readers must infer the chorus's composition from context. Events are presented at oblique angles — a woman's fate is often gestured at rather than stated, a love affair named only by its fragments. The text trusts readers to assemble meaning from juxtaposition, as Sappho's own fragmentary poems demand.
- Symbolic density: 78 out of 100
- Sappho's fragments function as repeating symbolic engines: Fragment 31, Fragment 16, the island, the name-change, the doll's house. Windows appear as sites of death, surveillance, and liberation (Rina's mother falls from one; Eileen Gray theorises the window as the eye without an eyelid). The novel's own fragmented form is its central symbol — incompleteness as both wound and method.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- The gap between aspiration and brutal legal reality — the Pisanelli Code granting women the right to make wills while denying them autonomy — carries gentle irony, but the narrative voice is fundamentally sincere. Schwartz does not hold her subjects at satiric distance; the 'we' identifies with, not against, the women it follows. The irony is structural rather than tonal.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- The novel is structurally fragmentary by design: most micro-chapters end mid-gesture, Lina Poletti disappears without explanation, Arianna is never finished, and the text closes not on resolution but on contemporary feminist chant. The sentence 'some acts can only be written as fragments, they shatter in your hands before the end' names the form as its content. Readers seeking narrative closure will not find it.
- Structural complexity: 85 out of 100
- Over a hundred labeled fragments span 1876 to the late 1920s across Italy, France, Greece, and England, each headed by a name and date. A collective narrator speaks across and through all of them, while embedded quotations from legal codes, letters, medical treatises, and Sapphic fragments interrupt and redirect the voice. The structure resembles Flights or Pedro Paramo in its discontinuous assembly, with the added complexity of a scholarly apparatus folded into the fiction itself.
How After Sappho is regarded
After Sappho holds a literary regard score of 38 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.