As in, do you look up every single word you don't get, or only the ones that seem important? I personally am not looking up anything at all now in the Master and Margarita, and even when I do look up, it's only the words that seem key. Otherwise it would just get too maddeningly slow to read in any language other than Dutch or English.

But if you do that and look up everything, and if the French translator of LotR has found equivalents for all of Tolkien's antiquated vocabulary, it's no surprise it takes ages to read a page, it would for me too under those circumstances.