An Instant in the Wind by André Brink
Published 1976 · 252 pages · 63,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is An Instant in the Wind to read?
An Instant in the Wind scores 52 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. 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: 42 out of 100
- Period 18th-century vocabulary with Afrikaans terms.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Brink's dense, lyrical sentences.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Questions of race, desire, and wilderness.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Colonial South Africa and journey dense with detail.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Dual perspectives with historical frame.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The wilderness, the crossing, race carry heavy weight.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Brink maintains complex distance from colonial assumptions.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Journey ends but what it means remains.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Dual perspectives with historical frame narrative.
How An Instant in the Wind is regarded
An Instant in the Wind holds a literary regard score of 45 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.