The Sacred Night by Tahar Ben Jelloun
Published 1987 · 198 pages · 50,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Sacred Night to read?
The Sacred Night scores 58 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: 55 out of 100
- Moroccan and French vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Poetic, dreamlike prose.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- Gender and identity.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Moroccan cultural detail.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- First-person transformation.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- Night, body, freedom.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Intimate narrator.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- Identity remains complex.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Sequel transformation.
How The Sacred Night is regarded
The Sacred Night holds a literary regard score of 57 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.