Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas
Published 2000 · 45,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Metafiction, Essays
How hard is Bartleby & Co. to read?
Bartleby & Co. scores 73 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: 56 out of 100
- Clear essayistic Spanish, with the difficulty lying in the density of literary reference rather than in diction.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Short numbered sections in a conversational voice; the sentences are deliberately easy.
- Abstraction: 76 out of 100
- A sustained argument about literature's relation to silence, conducted through anecdote but never grounded in narrative.
- Information density: 84 out of 100
- Eighty-six entries packed with names, dates, quotations and bibliographies, some genuine and some invented, arriving at a relentless rate.
- Narrative indirection: 76 out of 100
- The narrator's own story leaks out sideways through footnotes about other people, and he never states his situation directly.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Bartleby's formula, the invisible main text and the narrator's hunched back operate as a set of figures for literary refusal.
- Ironic distance: 84 out of 100
- A book about the impossibility of writing, written; fictional authorities cited as fact; and a narrator whose diagnosis of others is plainly self-description.
- Resolution withholding: 78 out of 100
- The notebook stops without the narrator deciding whether he will write again, and the invisible text it annotates never appears.
- Structural complexity: 80 out of 100
- A book consisting only of footnotes to a text that does not exist, in eighty-six discontinuous entries with no plot.
How Bartleby & Co. is regarded
Bartleby & Co. holds a literary regard score of 69 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.