Nocturnes for the King of Naples by Edmund White
Published 1978 · 40,700 words · about 4 hours at an average pace
How hard is Nocturnes for the King of Naples to read?
Nocturnes for the King of Naples scores 64 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: 72 out of 100
- Ornate, mannered, deliberately gorgeous.
- Sentence structure: 78 out of 100
- Very long, elaborately suspended sentences — his most demanding prose.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Concrete memory constantly dissolving into figure.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Light on incident, heavy on texture.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- An unnamed narrator addressing an absent lover, withholding names and facts.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- Almost everything is figurative; the surface rarely settles.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Some distance between the narrator's longing and his account of it.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- The address is never answered.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- An unnumbered, unchaptered address that moves freely in time.
How Nocturnes for the King of Naples is regarded
Nocturnes for the King of Naples holds a literary regard score of 49 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.