The Swindler by Francisco de Quevedo
Published 1626 · 45,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Classic Literature, Satire, Picaresque
How hard is The Swindler to read?
The Swindler scores 63 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: 82 out of 100
- Quevedo's conceptismo drives puns, thieves' cant, professional jargon and deliberately obscure wordplay into nearly every sentence; even in Spanish it needs annotation.
- Sentence structure: 72 out of 100
- Compressed, elliptical periods that hang a joke on a suppressed word or a shift of grammatical function, demanding constant rereading.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Relentlessly physical — food, filth, beatings, clothing — with its social argument carried in caricature rather than reflection.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- A crowded catalogue of Spanish social types, each drawn in a paragraph of concentrated detail, moving through five cities in a short book.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Pablos narrates his own degradation with a jauntiness that never acknowledges what is happening to him, and the gap is the reader's job.
- Symbolic density: 54 out of 100
- Hunger, clothing and the ritual humiliations function as a coherent scheme for a society organised entirely around appearances.
- Ironic distance: 88 out of 100
- The narrator's cheerfulness about atrocity, and the closing moral delivered by a man on his way to worse crimes, hold the book at a permanent sardonic remove.
- Resolution withholding: 64 out of 100
- It ends mid-career with a promise of a second part that never came, leaving Pablos sailing for the Indies and no account settled.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Episodic first-person picaresque in strict chronological order, its chapters linked by movement rather than plot.
How The Swindler is regarded
The Swindler holds a literary regard score of 77 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.