Funeral Rites by Jean Genet
Published 1969 · 70,400 words · about 9 hours at an average pace
How hard is Funeral Rites to read?
Funeral Rites scores 77 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very 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: 75 out of 100
- Ornate, liturgical, deliberately transgressive vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 78 out of 100
- Long incantatory sentences in difficult translation.
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- Grief and desire pushed into pure figure.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Compressed and allusive throughout.
- Narrative indirection: 82 out of 100
- A narrator who openly invents the scenes he describes.
- Symbolic density: 82 out of 100
- Almost nothing is literal; the whole book operates by figure.
- Ironic distance: 68 out of 100
- Reverence and desecration deliberately confused.
- Resolution withholding: 78 out of 100
- There is no resolution and none is sought.
- Structural complexity: 82 out of 100
- Fantasy, memory and reportage interleaved without markers.
How Funeral Rites is regarded
Funeral Rites holds a literary regard score of 64 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.