The Faces by Tove Ditlevsen
Published 2021 · 130 pages · 35,750 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Modernist & Experimental Fiction
How hard is The Faces to read?
The Faces scores 46 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: 33 out of 100
- A short Penguin Modern Classics translation of a mid-century Danish novel about a children's writer's breakdown. The register is likely plain and direct, closer to The Remains of the Day in clarity than to the ornate prose of Lolita.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- The translation by Nunnally presents a psychological novel of about 36,000 words. Nothing suggests dense hypotaxis, so sentences likely run closer to Beach Read in accessibility, with some strain as perception fragments.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- The book follows Lise Mundus through a hospitalisation, with voices and faces of family members and animals. The subject is concrete psychological experience, though psychosis adds abstraction beyond a plain realist story like To Kill a Mockingbird.
- Information density: 38 out of 100
- At about 36,000 words the book is compact, centred on one woman, her household and a locked ward. Density is closer to a short, focused novel than to the sprawl of Anna Karenina.
- Narrative indirection: 66 out of 100
- Lise's hallucinated voices and faces force readers to separate what is real from what she perceives. Her mind filters everything, which puts it closer to The Great Gatsby's biased narration than to the direct 1984.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- The faces of relatives and animals that Lise sees on the ward carry psychological weight beyond the literal. The effect is a restrained motif closer to The Remains of the Day than to the dense symbolism of To the Lighthouse.
- Ironic distance: 32 out of 100
- A harrowing portrayal of insanity that stays close to its protagonist suggests earnest, intimate narration. The irony is limited, as in Flights rather than Lolita.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- A novel of psychosis is likely to leave the boundary between reality and delusion open. Without confirmed knowledge of the ending, the score sits near The Great Gatsby's closed plot with open meaning.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- A short novel following Lise from marital suspicion through breakdown to the locked ward appears to follow a fairly linear course. Perceptual distortions add some disorientation, but nothing suggests the multi-strand design of The Master and Margarita.
How The Faces is regarded
The Faces holds a literary regard score of 47 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.