Compassion by Benito Pérez Galdós
Published 1897 · 85,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Classic Literature
How hard is Compassion to read?
Compassion scores 64 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: 62 out of 100
- Madrid beggars' slang, Sephardic and Arabic-inflected speech from Almudena rendered phonetically, and the genteel register of the ruined middle class.
- Sentence structure: 56 out of 100
- Supple narration with heavy use of dialogue in several distinct sociolects, demanding attention but never obstructive.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Concrete and street-level, with a persistent theological argument about grace and works running beneath.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- A large cast drawn from every level of Madrid poverty, plus household economics, church politics and a legal inheritance plot.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- The invented priest becomes real, and the novel keeps its narrator ambiguous about whether Benina's lie has been rewarded or punished.
- Symbolic density: 66 out of 100
- The invented Don Romualdo who materialises, Almudena's treasure ritual and the church steps as a labour market carry the book's argument about faith and money.
- Ironic distance: 78 out of 100
- The restored family's first act of respectability is to expel the woman who fed them, and Galdós presents it without a word of protest.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- Benina ends with nothing, blessing the people who ruined her, and the novel offers no judgement on whether this is holiness or waste.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Linear narration across a single Madrid winter with two social worlds cut against each other.
How Compassion is regarded
Compassion holds a literary regard score of 74 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.