The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1)

Author: Patrick Rothfuss

Rating: ⭐ 5/5

Date Read: 2016/03/01

Pages: 662

It’s been awhile since a book has completely transported me to another world. There’s an English major/teacher homunculus who lives in my head and always seems to interject with things like “look at all the symbolism” and “intertextuality” and “check out the narrative structure!” This is generally not that bad, but sometimes I want to turn it off. Enter fantasy novels.

There are a lot of things about fantasy that people dislike. There’s usually some sort of boy genius that is good at everything but somehow still has to put up with tremendous struggles to prove himself (Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker). There tends to be lots of exposition, sometimes artfully done (as in The Name of the Wind), sometimes not (those parts in The Lord of the Rings where Tolkien describes history in minute details and I pour myself an extra-large glass of wine). There are languages and creates and magical systems to keep track of, and no one has normal names, and the page counts tend to verge on the absurd. In short, fantasy has issues and I completely understand why it’s not exactly everyone’s cup of butterbeer.

This, though, is exactly the type of fantasy story that I love to read (even though it took me a couple of tries to get into it: the frame story is way less compelling that Kvothe’s own story). How can you not love a story in which the boy genius talks about music like this:

“Music is a proud, temperamental mistress. Give her the time and attention she deserves, and she is yours. Slight her and there will come a day when you call and she will not answer. So I began sleeping less to give her the time she needed.”

And then there’s this wonderfully meta insight about the nature of words:

“Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating … but there are other ways to understanding.”

Anyway, this hits all the right notes for me: interesting characters in a complex world, with such engrossing storytelling that I just couldn’t stop reading. If only I could read Proust this quickly. I wouldn’t recommend this to everyone, especially to those that need their plots tightly plotted and their world-building pushed to the background. But if you just want to curl up and listen to a great story, this book might just be for you.