The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen
Published 2017 · 226 pages · 56,500 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Unseen to read?
The Unseen scores 56 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
- Norwegian in translation.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Clear prose.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- War, identity, survival.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- WWII Norway.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Third person.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- Seeing, hiding.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Engaged witness.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- War ends.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Chronological.
How The Unseen is regarded
The Unseen 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.