Celestina by Fernando de Rojas
Published 1499 · 90,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Drama, Classic Literature, Tragedy
How hard is Celestina to read?
Celestina 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: 82 out of 100
- Late fifteenth-century Spanish crammed with proverbs, classical allusion, legal and medical vocabulary, and the technical language of procuring and witchcraft.
- Sentence structure: 80 out of 100
- Long Latinate periods in the lovers' rhetoric alternating with fast colloquial exchange, and set speeches built on classical models of accumulation.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Concrete in action and appetite, though the characters constantly argue philosophy, fortune and love in borrowed humanist terms.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Twenty-one acts of unbroken dialogue with a dozen speakers, a continuous stream of proverbs and classical citation, and no narration to orient the reader.
- Narrative indirection: 70 out of 100
- With no narrator at all, everything must be inferred from speech, including asides that contradict what characters have just said aloud.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The thread Celestina sells, the gold chain that kills her, the garden and the ladder work as a chain of objects driving the whole catastrophe.
- Ironic distance: 84 out of 100
- Calisto's courtly rhetoric is quoted straight and then mocked by his own servants two lines later; the book's moral prologue is contradicted by everything that follows.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- Everyone dies and Melibea's father delivers a lament about the world's cruelty that explains nothing and blames the wrong things.
- Structural complexity: 64 out of 100
- Pure dialogue across twenty-one acts, with time and place shifting between speeches and a prefatory apparatus that argues with the text.
How Celestina is regarded
Celestina holds a literary regard score of 83 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.