Insatiability by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
Published 1930 · 200,000 words · about 19 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopian
How hard is Insatiability to read?
Insatiability scores 82 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: 90 out of 100
- A torrent of philosophical terminology, invented words, Polish neologisms and technical vocabulary from painting, music and pharmacology, much of it coined by the author.
- Sentence structure: 86 out of 100
- Enormous sentences broken by parenthetical rants, footnotes by the author attacking his own characters, and abrupt shifts of register.
- Abstraction: 88 out of 100
- Extended passages of pure metaphysics on the nature of existence, the individual and art, embedded in the narrative without transition.
- Information density: 84 out of 100
- A complete invented political and philosophical order, dozens of characters, and continuous theoretical argument in a very long book.
- Narrative indirection: 76 out of 100
- The narrator interrupts, contradicts himself, footnotes his own text, and treats the protagonist with open contempt.
- Symbolic density: 78 out of 100
- The Murti-Bing pill, the advancing Chinese army and the dictator with no qualities function as a single sustained allegory for cultural surrender.
- Ironic distance: 84 out of 100
- Every philosophical position in the book is stated at length and then ridiculed, including the author's own, and the tone is unrelentingly sardonic.
- Resolution withholding: 82 out of 100
- The protagonist ends insane, the country is conquered without a fight, and the novel refuses to say whether the conquest is a disaster.
- Structural complexity: 80 out of 100
- Two parts of loosely connected episodes interrupted by authorial footnotes, philosophical treatises and an appended note on the book's own failures.
How Insatiability is regarded
Insatiability 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.