Conversations in Sicily by Elio Vittorini
Published 1941 · 48,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Modernist Fiction
How hard is Conversations in Sicily to read?
Conversations in Sicily scores 68 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: 44 out of 100
- Plain, restricted vocabulary used with deliberate poverty of means. The strangeness comes from repetition and rhythm rather than from difficult words.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Simple sentences arranged in incantatory repetitions and refrains, with dialogue that circles the same phrases for pages, so the reader must follow music rather than grammar.
- Abstraction: 74 out of 100
- The narrator's abstract furies are never defined, characters are named by function rather than person, and the second half moves into a register where a knife grinder discusses the wounded world in terms no knife grinder would use.
- Information density: 46 out of 100
- Few events and less background. Sicilian poverty, the Spanish war and fascist censorship press on every page without once being named.
- Narrative indirection: 82 out of 100
- The book's meaning is entirely in what censorship forced it to leave out. The narrator states almost nothing directly, and the final encounters with a soldier's ghost and a man washing the floor operate on a plane the surface never acknowledges.
- Symbolic density: 80 out of 100
- Oranges, herring, the mother's injections, the fourth or fifth Sicily the narrator says he is travelling in, the grinder's knives and the wounded world are figures that displace the literal almost completely.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- The policemen with comic nicknames, the mother's flat account of her adulteries and the narrator's insistence that he is not angry all run at an angle to what is plainly happening.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- Nothing is settled: the father is not found, the furies are not explained, and the book ends with a man weeping in a washhouse and a mother washing his feet, an image the text refuses to interpret.
- Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
- Forty-nine short numbered chapters in five parts, with a shift midway from realistic travel narrative into visionary sequence, and a closing episode involving a dead brother that may or may not be happening.
How Conversations in Sicily is regarded
Conversations in Sicily holds a literary regard score of 71 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.