How long does it take to read Barney's Version?
Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler takes about 7 hours 39 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 7 hours 39 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1997. 417 pages, about 114,675 words.
16 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 12 hours 45 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 39 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 47 minutes |
The page count is the median across 31 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Barney Panofsky smokes too many cigars, drinks too much whiskey, and is obsessed with two things: the Montreal Canadiens hockey team and his ex-wife Miriam. An acquaintance from his youthful years in Paris, Terry McIver, is about to publish his autobiography. In its pages he accuses Barney of an assortment of sins, including murder. It's time, Barney decides, to present the world with his own version of events. Barney's Version is his memoir, a rambling, digressive rant, full of revisions and factual errors (corrected in footnotes written by his son) and enough insults for everyone, particularly vegetarians and Quebec separatists. But Barney does get around to telling his life story, a desperately funny but sad series of bungled relationships. His first wife, an artist and poet, commits suicide and becomes--a la Sylvia Plath--a feminist icon, and Barney is widely reviled for goading her toward death, if not actually murdering her. He marries the second Mrs. Panofsky, whom he calls a "Jewish-Canadian Princess," as an antidote to the first; it turns out to be a horrible mistake. The third, "Miriam, my heart's desire," is quite possibly his soul mate, but Barney botches this one, too. It's painful to watch him ruin everything, and even more painful to bear witness to his deteriorating memory. The mystery at the heart of Barney's story--did he or did he not kill his friend Boogie?
Subjects: Fiction, Mathematical models, Risk assessment, Man-woman relationships, Murder, Jugenderinnerung
