Briefing for a Descent into Hell by Doris Lessing
Published 1971 · 286 pages · 85,233 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Briefing for a Descent into Hell to read?
Briefing for a Descent into Hell scores 61 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: 55 out of 100
- Psychiatric and visionary vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Experimental, visionary sentences.
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- Consciousness, reality, and sanity.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Dense with hallucination and medical detail.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- Madness or vision?
- Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
- The voyage, descent carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Lessing maintains complex distance.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- Reality never established.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- Vision and medical documents.
How Briefing for a Descent into Hell is regarded
Briefing for a Descent into Hell holds a literary regard score of 62 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.
Prizes
- Nobel Prize in Literature 2007, awarded to Doris Lessing
- Booker Prize 1971, shortlist
Where the story of Briefing for a Descent into Hell takes place
- London, early 1970s (1970 to 1971), the main setting