The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White
Published 1997 · 138,600 words · about 11 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Farewell Symphony to read?
The Farewell Symphony scores 58 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: 62 out of 100
- Rich, deliberately literary vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Long, shapely sentences.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Concrete lives held at a reflective distance.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- A very large cast across two decades.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- An older narrator reshaping his younger self and his dead friends.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- Music and the epidemic carry the weight.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Distance between the narrator's account and his own behaviour.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The deaths accumulate without consolation.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Non-chronological across twenty years.
How The Farewell Symphony is regarded
The Farewell Symphony holds a literary regard score of 52 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.