Prisoner of Love by Jean Genet
Published 1993 · 110,000 words · about 12 hours at an average pace
How hard is Prisoner of Love to read?
Prisoner of Love scores 72 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: 68 out of 100
- Ornate literary vocabulary with Palestinian and Arabic reference.
- Sentence structure: 72 out of 100
- Long, sinuous sentences in translation.
- Abstraction: 75 out of 100
- Politics, memory and desire held together abstractly.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Dense with allusion and recollection.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- Genet moves without warning between years, places and registers.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- The Panthers, the camps and the image recur as figures.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- Sustained ambiguity about his own attachment.
- Resolution withholding: 78 out of 100
- There is no conclusion; it ends where the writing stopped.
- Structural complexity: 82 out of 100
- Unmarked movement across a decade and two continents.
How Prisoner of Love is regarded
Prisoner of Love holds a literary regard score of 63 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.