Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski
Published 2020 · 48,400 words · about 3 hours at an average pace
How hard is Swimming in the Dark to read?
Swimming in the Dark scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately 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: 50 out of 100
- Lyrical but not obscure.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Long lyrical sentences addressed in the second person.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Concrete Polish setting carrying a political argument.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Light on incident.
- Narrative indirection: 48 out of 100
- Addressed to the absent lover, so everything is shaped by that address.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The lake, the forest and the queue do sustained work.
- Ironic distance: 38 out of 100
- Some distance between the narrator's account and his own choices.
- Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
- The political and personal endings are both left aching.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- A retrospective address, otherwise linear.
How Swimming in the Dark is regarded
Swimming in the Dark holds a literary regard score of 36 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.