The Quiet Violence of Dreams by K. Sello Duiker
Published 2001 · 125,675 words · about 10 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Quiet Violence of Dreams to read?
The Quiet Violence of Dreams scores 61 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
- South African English with township vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Long, urgent sentences.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Concrete Cape Town carrying a psychological argument.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Dense; a large cast and city.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- Several narrators, the main one in a psychiatric crisis.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The city and the sea do sustained work.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Little irony; the register is raw.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- The ending offers no settlement.
- Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
- Multiple voices, non-chronological.
How The Quiet Violence of Dreams is regarded
The Quiet Violence of Dreams holds a literary regard score of 46 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.