Bruno's Dream by Iris Murdoch
Published 1970 · 304 pages · 76,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Bruno's Dream to read?
Bruno's Dream scores 53 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
- Philosophical and domestic vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Murdoch's intricate sentences.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- Death, love, and illusion.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with philosophical observation.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Multiple perspectives on love.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Spiders, dying carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Murdoch maintains philosophical distance.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Death comes; love rearranges.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Multiple love plots converge.
How Bruno's Dream is regarded
Bruno's Dream 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.