Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard
Published 1984 · 192 pages · 52,800 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Satire & Humor, Modernist & Experimental Fiction
How hard is Woodcutters to read?
Woodcutters scores 60 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: 42 out of 100
- Bernhard uses plain, repetitive words, with a few Viennese cultural and musical references. The difficulty lies in the relentless recurrence, not in rare vocabulary, which puts it nearer The Remains of the Day than Ulysses.
- Sentence structure: 78 out of 100
- The novel is one unbroken paragraph of looping sentences with "I thought" and "he said" nested inside each other. The rhythm is hypnotic and demanding, less fragmented than Faulkner but more relentless than Fitzgerald.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- The narrator spins from a concrete dinner party into attacks on art, success, and Austrian culture. Ideas are always rooted in named people and scenes, though the rant keeps drifting toward general judgment.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Little happens: a chair, a funeral, a late dinner. The density comes from the repeated reassessments and layered memories of the circle, and it asks for attention rather than overloading it.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- Everything passes through the narrator's tirade, so readers must separate his view from the truth, as with Nick in The Great Gatsby but with stronger bias. The central facts, Joana's death and his own complicity, emerge by inference.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- The wing chair, the late actor and The Wild Duck carry meaning, yet the book is mostly literal rant. It sits below The Great Gatsby in its symbolic layering.
- Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
- The narrator condemns the guests while committing the same hypocrisy, and Bernhard lets us see it. The comedy of exaggeration and self-exposure puts it close to Lolita and Notes from Underground in irony.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- The dinner ends and the actor arrives, but the narrator's judgment, his guilt over Joana, and his relation to Vienna stay unsettled. It resolves its plot yet leaves the moral stance open.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- A single block of text with no chapters moves between funeral, dinner, and decades of memory. The structure is simple in outline but unbroken, closer to a formal experiment than to a conventional narrative.
How Woodcutters is regarded
Woodcutters holds a literary regard score of 68 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.