Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway
Published 2000 · 136,400 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Essays & Criticism
How hard is Death in the Afternoon to read?
Death in the Afternoon scores 35 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. 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: 42 out of 100
- Hemingway's plain English is studded with Spanish bullfighting terms such as faena, muleta and querencia. The specialist jargon is explained and glossed, so it sits well below the ornate literary anchors, near The Great Gatsby.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Hemingway's short declaratives dominate, though he sometimes strings long and-linked sentences in his digressions. It is clearer than Gatsby's balanced rhythms.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- The book is rooted in concrete ring action, but it reflects on death, courage and artistic truth. It sits near Atomic Habits in concreteness with a philosophical undertone.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Technical explanations of the corrida, rules, histories of matadors, breeding of bulls and appendices pack in a lot of detail. The density approaches that of Austerlitz in carefulness.
How Death in the Afternoon is regarded
Death in the Afternoon holds a literary regard score of 61 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.