War and War by László Krasznahorkai
Published 1999 · 90,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is War and War to read?
War and War scores 72 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. 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: 68 out of 100
- Krasznahorkai writes in dense, philosophical prose that translates from Hungarian into long, hypnotic sentences. The vocabulary is demanding, incorporating the arcane and the mundane as Korin's obsessions require increasingly precise expression.
- Sentence structure: 82 out of 100
- Sentences spiral through pages, building through accumulation and repetition as Korin pursues his mission. Krasznahorkai's prose has the rhythm of obsessive consciousness, each clause adding to a structure that seems to have no end.
- Abstraction: 80 out of 100
- The novel explores meaning, apocalypse, and the drive to preserve beauty through György Korin, a Hungarian archivist who travels to New York with a manuscript he believes reveals something essential about human civilization. His mission is to put it online before he dies.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- The manuscript's content, New York's streets, and the textures of Korin's deteriorating mental state layer through the long sentences. Krasznahorkai builds his portrait through accumulated attention to history, architecture, and the conviction that everything means something.
- Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100
- Korin's perspective reveals his certainty about the manuscript's importance without confirming it. The reader must track his journey while understanding the gap between his vision and what he actually accomplishes.
- Symbolic density: 75 out of 100
- The manuscript becomes symbolic of all attempts to preserve meaning against time. New York becomes symbolic of modernity's indifference to such attempts. Korin becomes symbolic of the visionary whose vision may be madness.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Krasznahorkai maintains complex proximity to Korin's obsession, taking it seriously while exposing its isolation. The novel is sympathetic to the need to believe in meaning while uncertain about meaning itself.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- Korin's mission reaches its conclusion, but what it accomplishes remains radically open. Krasznahorkai offers the ending that questions everything that led to it.
- Structural complexity: 75 out of 100
- The spiraling sentences and philosophical weight create demanding reading throughout. The novel requires surrender to a prose rhythm unlike most contemporary fiction.
How War and War is regarded
War and War holds a literary regard score of 53 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.