The Fencing Master by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Published 1988 · 90,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Mystery, Literary Fiction
How hard is The Fencing Master to read?
The Fencing Master scores 59 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: 58 out of 100
- Technical fencing terminology used throughout with precision, plus period political vocabulary from the last months of Isabel II's reign.
- Sentence structure: 54 out of 100
- Controlled nineteenth-century pastiche, formal but fluent, with long descriptive sentences in the salle scenes.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Physical and concrete, with a persistent argument about obsolescence and integrity carried by the fencing itself.
- Information density: 64 out of 100
- The politics of the 1868 revolution, the technical apparatus of classical fencing and a full Madrid social map, in a compact novel.
- Narrative indirection: 64 out of 100
- The reader is restricted to Don Jaime's limited and old-fashioned understanding, and the political machinery around him stays deliberately opaque.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The unstoppable thrust, the épée against the pistol and the aging master's treatise on an art nobody wants make one continuous figure.
- Ironic distance: 66 out of 100
- A man devoted to a code of absolute honour is used as an instrument by people who have none, and the novel lets him keep his dignity anyway.
- Resolution withholding: 48 out of 100
- The mystery resolves in the salle and the political plot is settled offstage, though the ending leaves Don Jaime's future entirely blank.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- Linear narration in eight chapters titled after fencing movements, with the plot structured as a formal bout.
How The Fencing Master is regarded
The Fencing Master holds a literary regard score of 54 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.