We Are Light by Gerda Blees
Published 2023 · 66,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Modernist & Experimental Fiction
How hard is We Are Light to read?
We Are Light scores 59 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: 40 out of 100
- Reception describes a formally inventive literary novel, but nothing indicates rare or specialised diction. Expect clear contemporary literary language in translation, closer to Beach Read in accessibility with more poetic range given the voices of an orange scent and the night.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Short chapters voiced by varied narrators suggest shifts in register rather than extreme sentence construction. The 66,000-word length and fragmentary design keep the syntax manageable, with something like Flights in its compression.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- The story centres on a concrete event, a woman starving in a commune, but narrators such as doubt and the night push the telling toward the abstract. The balance sits between The Road and The Remains of the Day.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- A short book built from many brief, differing accounts of a single death. Each voice adds a new angle, but the material stays focused on one event, so density is moderate.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- Each chapter speaks in a different voice and each gives a different answer to how Elisabeth died, so readers must infer the truth from conflicting testimony. Inanimate narrators like the scent of an orange and a cigarette demand reading between the lines, as in Flights.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- The central claim that people can live on light carries obvious metaphorical weight about belief and starvation. Personified narrators such as the night and doubt add symbolic layers beyond the literal event.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Narrators including bystanders and abstractions give a gap between the cult's promise of light and the plain fact of a death. The tone rests on moral seriousness drawn from true accounts, closer to Flights than to satire.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- Competing accounts of Elisabeth's death mean no single explanation closes the book. The death is known from the start, but the cause and blame stay contested, comparable to Lolita in open meaning.
- Structural complexity: 72 out of 100
- Every chapter has a different narrator, human and non-human, forming a chorus of testimony around one death. This fragmented, polyphonic design sits below Flights' 116 fragments but well above a linear novel.
How We Are Light is regarded
We Are Light holds a literary regard score of 40 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.
Prizes
- Dublin Literary Award 2025, shortlist
Where the story of We Are Light takes place
- Netherlands, present day (2020 to 2023), the main setting