The Gray Notebook by Josep Pla
Published 1966 · 250,000 words · about 21 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Memoir, Essays
How hard is The Gray Notebook to read?
The Gray Notebook scores 57 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: 62 out of 100
- An enormous concrete vocabulary of plants, winds, fish, tools and local trades, deployed with deliberate precision and no ornament.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Short, exact sentences and clean paragraphs, the result of a lifetime spent removing subordination.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Almost entirely observational, with abstraction confined to short reflections on style and character.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Nearly two years of daily entries packed with named people, places, meals, books and weather, at a rate that resists continuous reading.
- Narrative indirection: 54 out of 100
- The diary form conceals as much as it shows, and the fact that it was rewritten decades later puts every immediate impression at a distance.
- Symbolic density: 44 out of 100
- Pla distrusts symbols on principle; the tramuntana wind and the sea recur as facts that accumulate meaning by repetition.
- Ironic distance: 72 out of 100
- A dry, deflating irony is applied to everything, especially to the young diarist's own literary ambitions, by the older man who rewrote him.
- Resolution withholding: 66 out of 100
- The diary simply stops when he leaves for Paris, with no summary, arc or conclusion of any kind.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- Dated daily entries across two years with no plot, though the later rewriting introduces a hidden retrospective layer.
How The Gray Notebook is regarded
The Gray Notebook holds a literary regard score of 72 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.