Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau
Published 1942 · 328 pages · 90,200 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Modernist & Experimental Fiction, Satire & Humor, Literary Fiction
How hard is Witch Grass to read?
Witch Grass scores 62 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: 62 out of 100
- Reviews single out the puns and wordplay that Barbara Wright had to recreate in English, which points to playful, register-mixing language. It reads as demanding but less invented than Joyce, closer to the ornate wordplay of Lolita.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Readers report pronouns appearing before names and dialogue without attribution, which makes sentences harder to parse. The syntax stays short of the nested hypotaxis of Henry James and sits nearer Faulkner's fragmented perspectives.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- The publisher calls it a philosophical farce, so ideas run through comic incident on the outskirts of Paris. Concrete scenes with a junk dealer and a railway shack ground it, placing it near Pedro Paramo for concrete setting with abstract undertones.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Intrigues, double-dealings and wild goose chases involving many ambiguously named characters demand steady attention. At about 90,000 words it is dense with incident but not encyclopedic, somewhat above The Great Gatsby.
- Narrative indirection: 74 out of 100
- Unattributed dialogue, ambiguous names and pronouns before names force readers to work out who speaks and acts. That puts it above The Great Gatsby in inference demanded, closer to the evasive narration of 2666.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- A philosophical farce built on a man imagining another man into life suggests ideas working through the plot. Nothing in the evidence points to a heavy motif system, so it sits between 1984 and The Great Gatsby.
- Ironic distance: 72 out of 100
- Described as an epic comedy about the daily grind, with disreputable and endearing characters, it mocks ordinary life from a knowing distance. The farce tone puts it near Dead Souls in satirical register.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Wild goose chases and intrigues suggest a plot that teases closure, but the evidence says nothing about how the book ends. A moderate score between The Great Gatsby and Lolita reflects that comic farce usually resolves its plot while leaving meaning open.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- The shadowy figure begins as a café observer's imagining and then lives among a cast of interlocking characters, which suggests a layered setup. Readers report disorientation, but the evidence points to a more linear sequence of encounters than Midnight's Children.
How Witch Grass is regarded
Witch Grass holds a literary regard score of 52 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.