A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector
Published 1978 · 60,500 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Modernist & Experimental Fiction
How hard is A Breath of Life to read?
A Breath of Life scores 70 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: 42 out of 100
- Lispector uses plain words in unexpected combinations, so the difficulty lies in sense, not rare terms. It is closer to the spare compression of Pedro Paramo than to ornate prose.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Sentences are short, aphoristic and broken into fragments, with abrupt turns between voices. The syntax is simple but disjointed, as in Beckett's late prose.
- Abstraction: 88 out of 100
- The book dwells on existence, creation, death and the self, with little concrete event. It is nearer to Waiting for Godot in abstraction than to any narrative novel.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Each fragment carries a single compressed idea, and there are no plot threads or historical detail to track. The density is aphoristic, comparable to Flights in its self-contained pieces.
- Narrative indirection: 85 out of 100
- Readers must decide who speaks and what, if anything, happens between the Author and Angela. Meaning comes through inference and the blurring of voices, as in The Unnamable.
- Symbolic density: 75 out of 100
- Breath, music, flowers and the page recur as carriers of meaning, and the creator-creature pairing is itself allegorical. The whole book works as one extended figure for writing and mortality.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- The Author's self-mocking confessions and his bickering with Angela create play between statement and intent. The tone is mostly earnest and anguished, though, closer to Flights than to Lolita.
- Resolution withholding: 90 out of 100
- The book is unfinished and ends without any settling of the relationship or of the question of who creates whom. It resists closure in the manner of The Unnamable.
- Structural complexity: 78 out of 100
- The book moves through fragments, notes and alternating voices with no chronology, and the text was assembled after the author's death. It is less radically broken than Flights but strongly non-linear.
How A Breath of Life is regarded
A Breath of Life holds a literary regard score of 59 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.