Today is day eight, on which Frits suffers from a hangover from the night before, in which ad fundum proved to be a favourite exclamation. Frits wakes up 'with a mouth dry as cork' and takes upon himself to get out of bed, wash up and be done with it, but he falls asleep again. Given Frits' hangover, let's take it easy today and look briefly at a little comparison between Reve's The Evenings and the American coming-of-age novel The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, with which Reves novel is sometimes compared. It won't be a detailed comparison, but just some quick linguistic/lexical facts.
The Catcher in the Rye (image by Britannica.com)
The Evenings consists of 92.680 words, of which 7.017 are unique, resulting in a type-token-ratio of 0.08. (Again, you can use the Lexical Diversity Calculator to calculate these and more figures yourself.) The Catcher in the Rye is a bit shorter, with 73.629 words of which 4.511 are unique, providing us with a type-token-ratio of 0.06. The mean word lenght in the former novel is 4.11 letters, in the latter it is 3.90. The average sentence length in The Evenings of 10.38 words is however lower than that of the The Catcher in the Rye with 11.03 words. Interestingly, using the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm (Welch, 1984), we see identical compression rates, namely 0.81 on a scale from 0 (no repetition) to 1 (maximum repetition), meaning both novels contain an equal amount of repetition.
Have fun reading today (and go a bit easy on Frits...).