Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz
Published 1937 · 60,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Magical Realism
How hard is Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass to read?
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass scores 80 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: 86 out of 100
- The same extreme metaphorical density as his first book, drawing on botany, philately, medicine and Kabbalah.
- Sentence structure: 84 out of 100
- Sentences that keep opening new subordinate clauses to accommodate one more image, sustained across long paragraphs.
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- Time, textuality and the status of matter are the subjects, discussed openly by narrator and characters alike.
- Information density: 80 out of 100
- Continuous metaphor plus dense allusion to scripture, philately, myth and natural history in every story.
- Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100
- Contradictory versions of the father's death coexist without comment, and the narrator refuses to distinguish dream, memory and event.
- Symbolic density: 90 out of 100
- The Book, the hourglass, the stamp album and the reused hours build a symbolic system about time and text that governs the whole collection.
- Ironic distance: 70 out of 100
- A sanatorium that cures death by rewinding the clock is presented in the bland tone of a medical brochure, and the joke is never acknowledged.
- Resolution withholding: 84 out of 100
- The father is alive and dead simultaneously, the Book is never found, and the narrator ends as a blind railwayman on a train going nowhere.
- Structural complexity: 70 out of 100
- Thirteen stories with contradictory chronologies and a recursive relation between them, unified by voice rather than sequence.
How Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is regarded
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass holds a literary regard score of 79 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.