The Tree of Knowledge by Pío Baroja
Published 1911 · 85,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Philosophical Fiction
How hard is The Tree of Knowledge to read?
The Tree of Knowledge scores 56 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: 58 out of 100
- Clinical and philosophical vocabulary in a deliberately unliterary style; Baroja called his prose plain on principle.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Short, clipped sentences and rapid scene-changes, with the philosophical dialogue the only sustained difficulty.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- A novel organised around an argument about knowledge and life, with a central chapter that is straight philosophical dialogue.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Medical training, Madrid slum life, provincial politics and nineteenth-century German philosophy are all covered in a compact novel.
- Narrative indirection: 44 out of 100
- Third-person narration close to Andrés, who states his views plainly, with little irony between him and the author.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The two trees of Genesis structure the whole book, and the dissecting room, the Alcolea drought and Lulú's shop recur as figures of the same argument.
- Ironic distance: 54 out of 100
- Baroja's flat register applied to atrocity and to the pieties of Spanish public life produces a dry contempt that is never announced.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- The novel ends with Andrés's suicide reported in a line of dialogue — there was something of the precursor in him — and no explanation offered.
- Structural complexity: 44 out of 100
- Seven parts in chronological order, interrupted once by a chapter of pure philosophical dialogue that stops the narrative entirely.
How The Tree of Knowledge is regarded
The Tree of Knowledge holds a literary regard score of 75 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.