The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig
Published 1982 · 70,950 words · about 5 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Post-Office Girl to read?
The Post-Office Girl scores 54 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: 52 out of 100
- Clear German prose, well translated.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Measured sentences.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Concrete poverty carrying a political argument.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Moderate.
- Narrative indirection: 48 out of 100
- A close third person tied to a woman who cannot name what happened to her.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- The hotel and the post office do sustained work.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Steady distance between her hopes and her circumstances.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- It breaks off unfinished — it was published posthumously.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Two halves, the second much darker.
How The Post-Office Girl is regarded
The Post-Office Girl holds a literary regard score of 54 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.