Mist by Miguel de Unamuno
Published 1914 · 62,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Philosophical Fiction, Metafiction
How hard is Mist to read?
Mist scores 71 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: 58 out of 100
- Conversational Spanish shot through with philosophical terms and Unamuno's private coinages, plus stretches of scholastic argument about being and nothingness.
- Sentence structure: 56 out of 100
- Mostly dialogue and interior monologue in a loose, digressive style; the difficulty lies in following the argument rather than in parsing the sentences.
- Abstraction: 84 out of 100
- A comic novel whose real business is the ontology of fictional persons and the question of whether anyone can prove they were not invented.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Philosophical debate is folded into almost every scene, including a prologue by a character and an epilogue narrated by a dog.
- Narrative indirection: 76 out of 100
- The prologue is written by a character who contradicts the author, the author enters as a character, and the closing chapters are delivered by Augusto's dog Orfeo.
- Symbolic density: 64 out of 100
- Fog, the title's mist, is the condition of every character's mind, and Augusto's chess games and unopened doors keep restating it.
- Ironic distance: 82 out of 100
- Unamuno mocks his own hero, his own novel, his own theory of the novel, and finally himself, appearing as a pompous rector who loses an argument to his creation.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- Whether Augusto dies of overeating, of will, or of authorial fiat is left open, and the dog's epilogue makes it worse rather than better.
- Structural complexity: 74 out of 100
- A frame that leaks: prologue by a fictional character, post-prologue by the author, a chapter in which the two levels collide, and a coda from an animal.
How Mist is regarded
Mist holds a literary regard score of 80 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.