The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1) in The Sword and Laser

Nov 08, 2011 Amanda rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

This has to be one of my favorite books ever. Although I already owned a paperback copy, it was my first e-book purchase when I got my Kindle.

Patrick Rothfuss' writing is like nothing else I've ever read. Each sentence feels so carefully and lovingly crafted, it makes me despair of ever writing anything as poetic and wonderful. I've probably read it four or five times, and I never get tired of it. I still tear up in the same places, even though I know what's going to happen. I also love the way ...more

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Sep 26, 2011 Harold Ogle rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: faeries, fantasy, magic, orphan, bard

I enjoyed this book, which I can attempt to succinctly describe as a combination of Feist's Magician with the excessive detail of John Norman or Robert Jordan and the magic system of Ursula K. Le Guin, as written in the accessible style of David Eddings. That said, there are an awful lot of tells that this was a first novel - particularly Rothfuss' tendency toward "kitchen sink" writing (as in, "Everything and the kitchen sink"). It seems like he didn't exclude any darling idea. The Name of the I enjoyed this book, which I can attempt to succinctly describe as a combination of Feist's Magician with the excessive detail of John Norman or Robert Jordan and the magic system of Ursula K. Le Guin, as written in the accessible style of David Eddings. That said, there are an awful lot of tells that this was a first novel - particularly Rothfuss' tendency toward "kitchen sink" writing (as in, "Everything and the kitchen sink"). It seems like he didn't exclude any darling idea. The Name of the Wind labors at times because it's trying to include everything, as if Rothfuss was worried that he might not ever write another book, and so this was his one shot to get everything published.

As usual, I'm participating in the National Novel Writing Month (the annual November ritual to write 50,000 words/82 pages of new fiction), and so I was acutely aware that, after the first 50,000 words in The Name of the Wind, no actual plot had happened. Rothfuss takes a very long time to get the story really going, taking the first hundred pages or so to establish the present - a suspiciously elaborate inn in a secluded backwater village - and the past, where the protagonist, Kvothe, was born and raised, showing nearly effortless excellence in all things. In this respect, this book actually reminds me a bit of Grossman's The Magicians, in that it follows an unabashedly egotistic genius and the trouble he finds even though everything comes tremendously easily to him. In comparing the two, I found Kvothe more accessible, but that may have been in large part from the familiar fantasy trappings.

The book has many familiar fantasy tropes wrapped up into one story: the performer who learns a wide range of useful abilities through a traveling circus (Silverberg, Powers, Anthony, even Pullman), the street urchin who learns survival skills and instincts (Gygax's "Gord" series, countless others), the young prodigy earning the emnity of others through his academic brilliance (Feist, Grossman, Le Guin), the simple innkeeper who is more than he seems (just about everything), the legendary monster that everyone believes is just a fable but is actually true (actually, Rothfuss provides TWO of these in this novel), the wacky loon who is actually wise beyond others' understanding (Dragonlance, Shakespeare, everybody), and on and on...

As a result of this slow start, I found this really hard going at first. Eventually the familiarity of the tropes lulled me into acceptance, and then I was able to begin to appreciate how satisfying his revisiting/rehashing those tropes is. Rothfuss does a reasonably proficient job at inserting some doubt as to the outcome of the particulars at times, even though the framing story of the inn reduces the tension quite a bit - we know he survives, after all. So it is an impressive mashup of fantasy that you've almost certainly read elsewhere. By the end of the book, I was reading it compulsively and exclusively. ...more

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