Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Böll
Published 1959 · 294 pages · 74,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is Billiards at Half-Past Nine to read?
Billiards at Half-Past Nine 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: 45 out of 100
- Böll's German vocabulary in translation.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Stream-of-consciousness passages.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- German history and guilt explored.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Dense with German 20th-century history.
- Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
- Multiple time periods interlace.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The abbey, the buffalo, the lamb carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Böll writes with moral seriousness.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Day ends but German past remains.
- Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
- Single day with extensive flashbacks.
How Billiards at Half-Past Nine is regarded
Billiards at Half-Past Nine holds a literary regard score of 66 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.