An Impossible Love by Christine Angot
Published 2023 · 182 pages · 56,500 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is An Impossible Love to read?
An Impossible Love scores 45 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
- Clear French prose in translation.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Controlled sentences spanning decades.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Questions of class, gender, and impossible love.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- French social history across decades.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Gaps in narrative; readers fill in.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- Class, the absent father, marriage carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Angot maintains analytical distance.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Understanding comes but damage done.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Chronological spanning mother's life.
How An Impossible Love is regarded
An Impossible Love holds a literary regard score of 56 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.