The Cave by José Saramago
Published 2000 · 120,219 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Cave to read?
The Cave scores 59 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
- Portuguese in translation.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Saramago's flowing prose.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Allegory, capitalism.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Pottery, mall.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Third person, philosophical.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- Cave, Plato, center.
- Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
- Social critique.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- Discovery ending.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Allegorical narrative.
How The Cave is regarded
The Cave holds a literary regard score of 65 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.