Dreamtigers by Jorge Luis Borges
Published 1960 · 20,000 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Fiction, Poetry, Literary Fiction, Essays
How hard is Dreamtigers to read?
Dreamtigers scores 52 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
- Precise, literary vocabulary employed with characteristic economy. The poems draw on a wider range of diction than the prose pieces.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Compressed, aphoristic prose alternating with more expansive lyric poetry. The brevity of most pieces demands exact syntax.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Many pieces are pure meditations on creation, identity, and time. The parables operate at a high level of abstraction despite their narrative concreteness.
- Information density: 65 out of 100
- Extremely dense for its length. Each piece distills a philosophical insight into a paragraph or a page, and the poems compress entire arguments into stanzas.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- The parables approach their subjects obliquely, through metaphor and analogy. The autobiographical pieces maintain Borges's characteristic scholarly distance from personal revelation.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- Tigers, mirrors, labyrinths, coins, chess pieces, hourglasses — Borges's signature symbols appear in their most concentrated and personal form.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- More personally vulnerable than most Borges, though the self-deprecation and learned wit remain. 'Borges and I' is a masterpiece of ironic self-examination.
- Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
- The parables arrive at pointed conclusions, though these conclusions tend to open questions rather than close them. The poems achieve formal closure.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- A miscellany of forms — prose, poetry, parable — arranged without obvious thematic organization. The structural interest is in the juxtaposition of genres.
How Dreamtigers is regarded
Dreamtigers holds a literary regard score of 83 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.