Ashes and Diamonds by Jerzy Andrzejewski
Published 1948 · 95,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Political Fiction, Historical Fiction
How hard is Ashes and Diamonds to read?
Ashes and Diamonds scores 66 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: 52 out of 100
- Plain contemporary Polish with military and Party vocabulary from 1945, and the underground's own terminology.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Free indirect discourse shifting between a dozen consciousnesses, sometimes within a single paragraph.
- Abstraction: 54 out of 100
- Concrete in setting and action, with a running political argument conducted through the characters' incompatible positions.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- A large cast across every faction of a town in one day, with the political situation of 1945 Poland assumed rather than explained.
- Narrative indirection: 66 out of 100
- The novel moves through many minds without endorsing any, and the reader is never told which side the book is on.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- The title's Norwid epigraph about ash and the diamond within it, the burning drinks lit for dead comrades, and the polonaise at dawn organise the whole book.
- Ironic distance: 76 out of 100
- A victory banquet runs all night while the killing that decides the country's future happens outside, and the novel keeps cutting between them.
- Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
- The assassin dies on a rubbish heap, the political question is left open, and the celebrating town has understood nothing.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- Multiple viewpoints intercut across a compressed twenty-four hours in a single town.
How Ashes and Diamonds is regarded
Ashes and Diamonds holds a literary regard score of 68 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.