Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone
Published 1936 · 279 pages · 105,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Political Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is Bread and Wine to read?
Bread and Wine scores 60 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: 44 out of 100
- Deliberately simple prose in the manner of a folk narrative, with Catholic liturgical terms, Abruzzese rural vocabulary and Party jargon as the only specialised registers.
- Sentence structure: 46 out of 100
- Plain declarative sentences and long stretches of dialogue, written to be read by people with little schooling and translated to keep that plainness.
- Abstraction: 66 out of 100
- A sustained argument about whether Christian and revolutionary ethics can be the same thing, carried through Spina's conversations with the old priest Don Benedetto and through his own drift from doctrine to conscience.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- The Abyssinian war, the mechanics of fascist surveillance, the Comintern line and the internal fights of the Italian left are assumed rather than explained.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- The whole novel runs on a disguise, so almost every conversation carries a second meaning that the villagers cannot hear and the reader can. Spina's own convictions are shown to be shifting well before he admits it.
- Symbolic density: 76 out of 100
- Bread and wine — sacrament, peasant subsistence, and the two things the state confiscates — are worked continuously, alongside the cassock, the donkey, and the snow that closes the last chapter.
- Ironic distance: 68 out of 100
- An atheist revolutionary becomes the most effective priest in the region; the Party's instructions are useless and the confessional is not. Silone lets the joke run without ever letting it become farce.
- Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
- The revolution does not happen, the girl dies, and the last scene sends an old man into the snow after a fugitive with no indication whether either survives.
- Structural complexity: 44 out of 100
- Linear third-person narration with a large cast and frequent shifts of viewpoint among villagers, plus Silone's own extensive 1955 revision, which produced two substantially different texts.
How Bread and Wine is regarded
Bread and Wine holds a literary regard score of 70 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.