Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti
Published 1935 · 172,000 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Satire & Humor
How hard is Auto-da-Fé to read?
Auto-da-Fé scores 56 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
- Intellectual vocabulary, philosophy and books.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Dense, elaborate sentences matching Kien's mind.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- Intellectual isolation and madness.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Dense with obsessive detail.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Kien's perspective distorts reality.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Books, the library, fire carry heavy weight.
- Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
- Canetti's satire of intellectualism is devastating.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Catastrophe comes but meaning remains.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Three-part structure following Kien's destruction.
How Auto-da-Fé is regarded
Auto-da-Fé holds a literary regard score of 70 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.