How long does it take to read In the Absence of Men?
In the Absence of Men by Philippe Besson takes about 3 hours 18 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 18 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2001. 180 pages, about 49,500 words.
7 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 5 hours 30 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 18 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 4 minutes |
The page count is the median across 10 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
'I am sixteen. I am as old as the century'It is 1916. Vincent is sixteen, on the brink of manhood. Vincent is aristocratic and privileged, frequenting the salons of Paris while France is at war and the city almost deserted of men. In that brutal summer, Vincent's beauty and precocity captivate two men: Marcel, some thirty years his senior, a writer and celebrated socialite; and Arthur, the twenty-one year old son of one of the servants, who is now a soldier at the front. Both relationships become love affairs of a kind - of the mind or of the body. Vincent intuitively tries to keep his passions separate, but over the weeks of indolent Parisian summer and far-off war, confidences are made, absences endured, secrets revealed. All of these men will suffer, and Vincent will lose the last vestiges of his childhood innocence. In the Absence of Men is a stunning first novel: in its daring in representing Marcel Proust as a character, in the beauty of its prose and in its delicacy of feeling. It is a quite remarkable debut.
Subjects: Gay men, Fiction, Upper class, Fiction, historical, general, France, fiction, Fiction, general
