Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
Published 1999 · 42,625 words · about 3 hours at an average pace
How hard is Autobiography of Red to read?
Autobiography of Red scores 71 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very 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: 62 out of 100
- Classical vocabulary against deliberately flat modern speech.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Verse lines of wildly varying length, syntax often broken across them.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- A myth used to think about difference and desire.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Compressed, and it assumes Stesichorus.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- A monster narrates his own adolescence; the frame keeps interrupting.
- Symbolic density: 82 out of 100
- Redness, wings and volcanoes work figuratively on every page.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- The scholarly apparatus is half serious and half a joke.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- The ending is an image, not a conclusion.
- Structural complexity: 82 out of 100
- Fake scholarly essay, fragments, verse novel and an invented interview.
How Autobiography of Red is regarded
Autobiography of Red holds a literary regard score of 78 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.