Return to Ithaca by Eyvind Johnson
Published 1946 · 492 pages · 100,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · literary fiction, mythological retelling, historical fiction, war fiction
How hard is Return to Ithaca to read?
Return to Ithaca scores 61 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
- Mary Sandbach's English translation uses an elevated, faintly formal register — epithets, the vocabulary of oar, sail, and spear — to evoke Homer's epic without turning into specialized jargon. It sits above The Great Gatsby's 'elegant but accessible' plainness but well short of Moby-Dick's dense whaling terminology or Ulysses's allusive density.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- The prose alternates between spare, declarative scenes on present-day Ithaca and long, interior, backward-spiraling sentences when Odysseus recalls Troy and his years of wandering — closer to the layered but still-navigable paragraphs of 2666 than to Faulkner's page-long sentences or Joyce's unpunctuated monologue.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- Johnson keeps interrupting the adventure plot with sustained meditation on memory, guilt, and what a soldier owes the truth when he tells his own war stories — concrete scenes that keep tipping into reflection, in the register of the debate-heavy chapters of The Brothers Karamazov rather than the pure abstraction of Waiting for Godot.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Two full timelines — the decade of war and wandering, and the few days of the actual homecoming — are folded together with mythological allusion and psychological interiority, denser than Gatsby's compression but without War and Peace's historical apparatus or 2666's layered timeframes.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- Odysseus narrates his own most fantastical adventures — the Cyclops, Circe, the descent to the dead — as a performance for the Phaeacian court, and the novel keeps asking how much of that performance is memory versus self-mythologizing. That demands more inference than 1984's direct exposition, in the range of Gatsby's narrator-shaped truth.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- As a retelling of Western literature's founding homecoming story, nearly every object carries inherited symbolic weight — the marriage bed rooted in a living tree, the bow only its true owner can string, the loom worked by day and unworked by night — putting it in Heart of Darkness's territory of journey-as-symbol, denser than To Kill a Mockingbird's single central image.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- Johnson keeps Homer's plot beats but drains them of triumphant certainty, so a reader who knows the Odyssey feels a steady gap between the heroic version of events and the exhausted, morally compromised man actually living them — closer to Gatsby's 'sympathy and critique simultaneous' than to Lolita's seductive unreliability.
- Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
- The plot resolves exactly as the myth demands — the suitors die, husband and wife reunite — so closure is formally similar to Gatsby's 'closed plot, open meaning.' What stays unsettled is whether the homecoming actually repairs what twenty years of war did to Odysseus.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- Present-tense scenes of the return on Ithaca are threaded through with extended flashback narration of Troy and the years of wandering, plus tales-within-tales told to the Phaeacian court, putting it nearer Midnight's Children's flashback-heavy multiple timelines than Gatsby's simple retrospection or War and Peace's straight chronology.
How Return to Ithaca is regarded
Return to Ithaca holds a literary regard score of 60 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.