This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski
Published 1948 · 55,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Short Stories, War Fiction, Holocaust Literature
How hard is This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen to read?
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen scores 67 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: 54 out of 100
- Camp slang and German commands left untranslated, in otherwise plain, hard Polish with a deliberately reduced vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Short declarative sentences and clipped dialogue; the prose is stripped to reportage.
- Abstraction: 38 out of 100
- Almost entirely physical — bread, boots, bodies, weather — with no moral commentary offered anywhere.
- Information density: 64 out of 100
- The camp's full economic and social system is conveyed through incidental detail at a fast rate, with no exposition.
- Narrative indirection: 88 out of 100
- The narrator is a beneficiary of the machinery he describes and never once signals judgement, so the reader must supply everything the text refuses.
- Symbolic density: 54 out of 100
- The football match played against the background of a transport, and the bread that is also a dead person's property, do the work without being pressed.
- Ironic distance: 94 out of 100
- The title is a cheerful usher's phrase, and the whole book is narrated in the tone of a man describing a difficult but interesting job.
- Resolution withholding: 84 out of 100
- No story offers rescue, meaning or a verdict; the last piece ends with the narrator alive in a displaced-persons camp and unable to say what that was for.
- Structural complexity: 46 out of 100
- Independent stories in loose chronological order with a consistent narrator and no framing device.
How This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen is regarded
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen holds a literary regard score of 77 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.