How long does it take to read Death and the Dervish?
Death and the Dervish by Meša Selimović takes about 8 hours 40 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 40 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1996. 473 pages, about 130,075 words.
18 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 14 hours 27 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 40 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 25 minutes |
The page count is the median across 1 edition, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Death and the Dervish is a first-person narrative told from the point of view of Sheikh Nuruddin, a dervish at a Sarajevo monastery in the eighteenth century during the Turkish occupation. The spiritual leader of a group of Moslems, Sheikh Nuruddin has deliberately removed himself from the day-to-day activities of society. This distance is shattered, though, by the arrest of his brother. As Sheikh Nuruddin attempts to find out what has happened to his brother and to intervene on his behalf, he is drawn into the Kafkaesque world of the Turkish authorities. As he does so, he begins to question his relations with society as a whole and, eventually, his life choices in general. A literary masterpiece that was hugely successful when published in Yugoslavia in the 1960s, Death and the Dervish appears here in its first English translation.
Subjects: Fiction, History, Revenge, Mevleviyeh, Bosnia and hercegovina, fiction, Fiction, historical
