Farewell to Autumn by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
Published 1927 · 115,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Modernist Fiction, Dystopian Fiction
How hard is Farewell to Autumn to read?
Farewell to Autumn scores 77 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: 88 out of 100
- Witkacy invents words, imports philosophical jargon from his own ontology, and mixes Zakopane slang with Latin, French, and mock-scientific terminology on the same page.
- Sentence structure: 82 out of 100
- Sentences pile subordinate clauses, parenthetical self-corrections, and footnoted asides until the grammar itself feels like a symptom.
- Abstraction: 86 out of 100
- The characters argue Witkacy's Pure Form theory, the ontology of individual existence, and the fate of metaphysical feeling for pages at a stretch.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Philosophy, drug pharmacology, political theory, and Polish cultural gossip of the 1920s arrive at once, much of it in footnotes.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- The narrator interrupts, mocks his own characters, and inserts authorial footnotes, so no account of an event can be taken straight.
- Symbolic density: 74 out of 100
- The autumn of the title, the leveling revolution, and Atanazy's drug visions work as one sustained figure for the death of European interiority.
- Ironic distance: 85 out of 100
- Witkacy parodies the decadent novel while writing one, and lets his hero's grand metaphysical anguish look ridiculous without ever saying so.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- Atanazy is killed casually and offhand, the revolution settles into tedium, and none of the metaphysical questions receives an answer.
- Structural complexity: 74 out of 100
- Digressions, authorial footnotes, treatise-length dialogues, and abrupt time jumps break the narrative continuously.
How Farewell to Autumn is regarded
Farewell to Autumn holds a literary regard score of 65 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.