At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
Published 1939 · 285 pages · 80,575 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Satire & Humor
How hard is At Swim-Two-Birds to read?
At Swim-Two-Birds scores 58 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: 50 out of 100
- Irish literary language, parody of multiple styles.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Deliberately varied, parodying everything from saga to cowboy novel.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Metafictional questions about authorship and reality.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with parody, allusion, and competing narratives.
- Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
- Characters rebel against author; multiple nested fictions.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The act of writing itself becomes symbolic.
- Ironic distance: 65 out of 100
- O'Brien's parody and irony pervade every level.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Endings proliferate; which is authoritative?
- Structural complexity: 70 out of 100
- Three beginnings, nested fictions, characters from multiple genres.
How At Swim-Two-Birds is regarded
At Swim-Two-Birds holds a literary regard score of 79 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.