The Impossible Object by Nicholas Mosley
Published 1969 · 219 pages · 53,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Short Fiction
How hard is The Impossible Object to read?
The Impossible Object scores 64 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
- Mosley writes in literary, experimental prose that shifts registers between stories. The vocabulary is accessible while serving different tonal purposes in each interlocking narrative.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Sentences vary from conventional storytelling to fragmented modernist disruption. Mosley's prose adapts to each story's demands while building toward the larger pattern.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- The collection explores how stories construct and undermine reality, whether consistent identity is possible, and how love persists through contradictory narratives. The impossible object is coherent meaning itself.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Contemporary British life, film production, and the textures of intellectual middle-class existence layer through the stories. Mosley builds his world through accumulated cultural and personal detail.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- Eight stories present different versions of seemingly the same characters and events. The reader must navigate contradictions without expecting resolution into a single consistent narrative.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- The impossible object of the title—a visual paradox that cannot exist in three dimensions—becomes symbolic of how stories create impossible but compelling wholes. Film becomes symbolic of how we construct reality.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- Mosley maintains ironic distance from narrative convention itself, showing how stories both create and undermine meaning. The collection is skeptical of coherence while demonstrating its seductions.
- Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
- The stories refuse to resolve into a single consistent narrative. Mosley offers the impossibility as the point—we cannot make the pieces fit.
- Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
- Eight interlocking stories present contradictory versions of characters and events. The structure is demanding, requiring readers to accept impossibility as the collection's subject and form.
How The Impossible Object is regarded
The Impossible Object 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.