The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas
Published 1957 · 224 pages · 59,107 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · literary fiction, psychological fiction, Nordic modernism
How hard is The Birds to read?
The Birds scores 56 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: 22 out of 100
- The prose employs a deliberately plain, even sparse vocabulary — short Anglo-Saxon words, simple nouns, basic verbs. Vesaas (in Mortensen's translation) writes close to folk-speech, with almost no latinate abstraction or specialized diction. The challenge is not the words themselves but what they withhold.
- Sentence structure: 25 out of 100
- Sentences are short to medium in length, often paratactic, mirroring Mattis's fragmented inner voice. Free indirect discourse slides between narrator and protagonist without typographical signals, which can momentarily disorient, but the basic clause structure stays simple throughout.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- The novel operates through concrete particulars — the woodcock's flight path, knitting needles, a rotten plank — but these objects carry enormous symbolic weight that demands interpretive lift. Vesaas never names the emotional registers he is exploring; the reader must do that work.
- Information density: 30 out of 100
- Plot events are sparse and slowly unfolded; almost nothing happens by conventional novelistic standards. Each short chapter delivers one small incident or interior moment, leaving wide margins of implication. Readers accustomed to dense narrative will find the pace disorienting but not cognitively heavy.
- Narrative indirection: 75 out of 100
- The novel's central subject — a cognitively disabled man's existential isolation and ultimately suicidal act — is approached entirely through displacement, symbol, and understatement. Mattis's final 'plan' is never named as suicide; the reader must assemble its meaning from the white oars, the rotten plank, and his conversations. The ending offers no resolution beyond ambiguity.
- Symbolic density: 82 out of 100
- Every concrete element doubles as symbol: the woodcock and its flight path (Mattis's inner life, grace that cannot be owned), the withered aspens named Mattis-and-Hege (mortality and exclusion), the stone over the dead bird's eyes (suppression of the unbearable), the oars (chosen fate vs. salvation). The novel's entire emotional argument is conducted through this network.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- There is no narratorial irony at Mattis's expense — the narrative perspective aligns closely with his bewildered consciousness. The irony is structural: Mattis cannot read the situations the reader can, but Vesaas prevents condescension by making Mattis's perceptions more accurate than anyone else's in key moments. The gap between what Mattis understands and what we understand is productive rather than mocking.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- The novel ends mid-catastrophe, with Mattis struggling in open water and his cry sounding 'like the call of a strange bird' — his fate is not disclosed. Nothing in Hege-and-Jørgen's story is resolved. The woodcock's meaning is never explained. Vesaas systematically refuses closure at every level, demanding the reader supply it.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- The structure is linear and episodic — a single summer and autumn, roughly chronological — with no flashbacks, multiple timelines, or formal experimentation. The chapters are brief vignettes, almost lyric in compression. The simplicity of structure is deliberate and contributes to the fable-like quality.
How The Birds is regarded
The Birds holds a literary regard score of 71 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.