The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman
Published 2012 · 368 pages · 92,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · History, Literary Fiction
How hard is The Teleportation Accident to read?
The Teleportation Accident 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: 65 out of 100
- Beauman writes in energetic, allusive prose that jumps between Weimar Berlin, 1930s Paris, and wartime Los Angeles. The vocabulary is playful and demanding, incorporating period slang, scientific terminology, and historical references.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Sentences are often propulsive and digressive, building through Beauman's characteristic maximalism. His prose has the rhythm of someone who finds connections everywhere, piling up comparisons and observations.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- The novel explores obsession, exile, and the persistence of bad luck through Egon Loeser, a Berlin stage designer chasing an unattainable woman across continents while history collapses around him. His myopic pursuit becomes comic and tragic in equal measure.
- Information density: 65 out of 100
- Weimar theatre, Nazi exile communities, and wartime Los Angeles layer through the narrative alongside seventeenth-century stage technology and contemporary physics. Beauman builds his world through accumulated attention to historical oddities and connections.
- Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
- Loeser's perspective reveals his obsessions while obscuring their absurdity from himself. The reader must track historical events he ignores while understanding how his self-absorption creates and extends his misfortunes.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The teleportation device becomes symbolic of the desire to escape our circumstances. The failed romance becomes symbolic of obsessions that survive all evidence against them. The historical catastrophes become symbolic backdrop that characters refuse to notice.
- Ironic distance: 70 out of 100
- Beauman maintains substantial ironic distance from Loeser's tunnel vision while the novel's whole structure generates ironies about what we ignore. The comedy is dark, with catastrophe and farce intertwined.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Loeser's story reaches its end; whether he's learned anything remains dubious. Beauman offers conclusion without redemption, letting the absurdity speak for itself.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- Multiple timeframes and locations create busy structure, with seventeenth-century interpolations adding complexity. The connections are playful rather than demanding, rewarding attention without requiring it.
How The Teleportation Accident is regarded
The Teleportation Accident holds a literary regard score of 56 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.