Chess Story by Stefan Zweig
Published 1942 · 30,800 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Chess Story to read?
Chess Story scores 54 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: 52 out of 100
- Clear German prose, well translated.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Measured sentences of moderate length.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Concrete shipboard scene carrying a political argument.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Compressed; a great deal in very few pages.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- A frame narrator relaying another man's account.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- Chess itself carries the whole meaning.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Quiet distance between the frame narrator and what he reports.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- The ending is abrupt and leaves the diagnosis open.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- A story within a story.
How Chess Story is regarded
Chess Story holds a literary regard score of 68 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.