Dreams and Discourses by Francisco de Quevedo
Published 1627 · 55,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Satire, Classic Literature, Essays
How hard is Dreams and Discourses to read?
Dreams and Discourses scores 70 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: 84 out of 100
- Puns, proverbs turned inside out, professional jargon from law, medicine and tailoring, and coinages that exist only in these pages.
- Sentence structure: 74 out of 100
- Dense conceptista prose that packs an inversion or a double sense into most clauses and rarely lets a sentence land where it began.
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- Allegorical figures and moral abstractions are the cast, and the satire works by making concepts behave like people.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- A relentless procession of professions, vices and social types, each sketched in a line or two, with allusions to scripture, law and folklore throughout.
- Narrative indirection: 56 out of 100
- A dreaming narrator reports what devils and personifications tell him, so every judgement arrives at one remove and in a hostile mouth.
- Symbolic density: 76 out of 100
- Everything is allegory — the street of Deceit, the anatomised body of the world, the proverbs given legs — and the images are the argument.
- Ironic distance: 92 out of 100
- Nothing in the book is said straight; the moral is always delivered by a demon, a corpse or a thief with an interest in the outcome.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- The visions break off rather than conclude, and no vice is corrected or judgement finalised, since the point is that Spain will go on as it is.
- Structural complexity: 54 out of 100
- Five independent dream visions assembled into a book, each a loose procession of episodes with no plot to hold it.
How Dreams and Discourses is regarded
Dreams and Discourses holds a literary regard score of 73 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.