What I Know About You by Éric Chacour
Published 2023 · 288 pages · 62,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · literary fiction, LGBTQ+ fiction, historical fiction, family saga
How hard is What I Know About You to read?
What I Know About You scores 48 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. 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: 44 out of 100
- Chacour writes in clear, controlled contemporary prose (rendered in equally spare English by translator Pablo Strauss), mixing everyday Cairo detail — medical terms from Tarek's practice, Levantine and Arabic touches — into otherwise accessible language. There's texture here, not obscurity.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- The prose favors short, exact sentences over heavy subordination, in keeping with the novel's spare second-person opening address. It reads quickly without feeling simplistic — closer to Ishiguro's restraint than to any deliberately difficult stylist.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Much of what matters in the novel goes unsaid: shame, longing, and family duty operate beneath a surface of concrete domestic and medical detail. As in The Remains of the Day, the real emotional stakes sit abstracted beneath plainly narrated events.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- At roughly 220 pages, this is a compact novel that compresses two decades and two continents without turning encyclopedic; historical context — Nasser-era Egypt, Sadat's assassination — is present but sketched in rather than researched in depth.
- Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
- The novel opens by addressing Tarek in the second person without identifying who is speaking, and holds that ambiguity for roughly half the book before revealing the narrator's identity and connection to him. Readers must actively track who 'you' refers to before they can trust what they're being told.
- Symbolic density: 48 out of 100
- A pocket watch inherited from Tarek's father and eventually passed on by the narrator functions as the novel's clearest symbol of inheritance and reconciliation; recurring sensory contrasts — Cairo's spices and streets against Montreal's cold — do quieter work marking exile.
- Ironic distance: 32 out of 100
- Despite the emotional remove built into addressing its subject as 'you,' the novel is fundamentally sincere rather than ironic: it withholds information but never undercuts its characters or asks readers to doubt the narrator's sympathy for Tarek.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- The novel's three-part structure moves toward disclosure and a form of reunion by its final pages, but Ali's ultimate fate and the full cost of Tarek's exile remain losses the book doesn't fully resolve, only makes a kind of peace with.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- Chacour builds the novel around a shift in grammatical person — 'You,' then 'Me,' then a closing 'We' — layered over a nonlinear timeline moving between 1960s-80s Cairo and turn-of-the-millennium Montreal. It's a more formally ambitious structure than the plain sentences might suggest.
How What I Know About You is regarded
What I Know About You holds a literary regard score of 54 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.