Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard
Published 1843 · 313 pages · 40,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Religion & Spirituality, Nonfiction
How hard is Fear and Trembling to read?
Fear and Trembling scores 70 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: 58 out of 100
- Kierkegaard uses philosophical and theological terms such as the universal, mediation and the teleological, but the diction stays plain next to Hegel. Johannes' lyrical retellings of Abraham's journey are clear and rhythmic, closer to Notes from Underground than to Gravity's Rainbow.
- Sentence structure: 66 out of 100
- Long, looping periodic sentences with rhetorical questions and parenthetical turns carry the argument. Danish-to-English translation keeps the winding clauses, though they are shorter than Jamesian hypotaxis.
- Abstraction: 86 out of 100
- The Abraham story anchors the text, but the arguments about the universal, the absolute relation and the absurd are pure philosophy. Like Notes from Underground, ideas are the plot.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- At roughly 40,000 words, nearly every paragraph advances a distinction: resignation versus faith, the ethical versus the religious. It is compact and demands slow reading, with little filler.
How Fear and Trembling is regarded
Fear and Trembling holds a literary regard score of 89 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.