The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino
Published 1959 · 32,000 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Fable, Literary Fiction, Fantasy
How hard is The Nonexistent Knight to read?
The Nonexistent Knight scores 66 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: 46 out of 100
- Chivalric and military vocabulary — paladins, gonfalons, quartering, feudal procedure — used with mock precision, otherwise clear and quick.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Brisk narrative sentences with comic catalogues and the chronicler's asides breaking in, no significant grammatical difficulty.
- Abstraction: 74 out of 100
- The book's subject is being itself: a knight who exists only as function and will, a squire who exists only as matter, and an army of men in between. Calvino argues it through jokes but he argues it continuously.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- Short and fast, with the Carolingian setting sketched in broad parody and no historical burden on the reader.
- Narrative indirection: 70 out of 100
- Sister Theodora's frame is unreliable and self-interrupting, she keeps confessing that she is inventing what she cannot know, and the last chapter reveals who she is, which retroactively changes the status of everything reported.
- Symbolic density: 82 out of 100
- The empty armour and its opposite in Gurduloo make a single sustained figure about form and matter, worked through every episode from the Holy Grail knights to the paperwork.
- Ironic distance: 82 out of 100
- A chivalric romance in which the most virtuous knight is nobody, war is administration, and the Grail knights turn out to be a protection racket. The satire is aimed simultaneously at heroism, at bureaucracy and at the modern organisation man.
- Resolution withholding: 64 out of 100
- Agilulf dissolves into an empty suit on a hillside, his armour is inherited, and the chronicler abandons her convent mid-sentence to run after an army, closing the book on a joke rather than a conclusion.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- A nested frame in which a nun writes a chivalric romance she keeps interrupting to discuss the difficulty of writing it, with a twist that reframes the narrator in the final pages.
How The Nonexistent Knight is regarded
The Nonexistent Knight 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.