REVIEW: The Name of the Wind

Patrick Rothfuss
The Name of the Wind (Kingkiller Chronicles, Day 1)
DAW
ISBN-10: 0756404746
ISBN-13: 978-0756404741
Fantasy
April 1, 2008

Blurb via Goodreads (it’s a long one, folks):

My name is Kvothe, pronounced nearly the same as “quothe.” Names are important as they tell you a great deal about a person. I’ve had more names than anyone has a right to. The Adem call me Maedre. Which, depending on how it’s spoken, can mean The Flame, The Thunder, or The Broken Tree.

“The Flame” is obvious if you’ve ever seen me. I have red hair, bright. If I had been born a couple of hundred years ago I would probably have been burned as a demon. I keep it short but it’s unruly. When left to its own devices, it sticks up and makes me look as if I have been set afire.

“The Thunder” I attribute to a strong baritone and a great deal of stage training at an early age.

I’ve never thought of “The Broken Tree” as very significant. Although in retrospect, I suppose it could be considered at least partially prophetic.

My first mentor called me E’lir because I was clever and I knew it. My first real lover called me Dulator because she liked the sound of it. I have been called Shadicar, Lightfinger, and Six-String. I have been called Kvothe the Bloodless, Kvothe the Arcane, and Kvothe Kingkiller. I have earned those names. Bought and paid for them.

But I was brought up as Kvothe. My father once told me it meant “to know.”

I have, of course, been called many other things. Most of them uncouth, although very few were unearned.

I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep.

You may have heard of me.

So begins the tale of Kvothe—from his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, to years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-riddled city, to his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a difficult and dangerous school of magic. In these pages you will come to know Kvothe as a notorious magician, an accomplished thief, a masterful musician, and an infamous assassin. But The Name of the Wind is so much more—for the story it tells reveals the truth behind Kvothe’s legend.

Wow! Okay, that is a very long blurb. It promises a lot in the way of a good story. I can assure you that I found it to be a very good story. Yes, some parts understandably lagged in a book this long (736 pages), but The Name of the Wind will undoubtedly carry through the rest of the year to take its place amongst my favorite reads in 2010.

Kote is a quiet, unassuming man who runs a small inn in an even more quiet and unassuming town. One night that quiet life comes crashing to a halt when one of the villagers encounters a sinister and till-then mythical evil. Bloodied and severly injured, the villager shows them the monster that’s responsible, and Kote knows what’s awakened and now upon the unsuspecting townsfolk. A few evenings later, after Kote tries to face the evil now stalking the countryside, a man widely known as Chronicler, otherwise as Devan Lochees, recognizes Kote and threatens to blow the innkeepers hard-earned cover. In order to placate Chronicler, who is famous for recording events and “debunking” them, Kote agrees to tell him his story.

What ensues is a back-and-forth showing of Kote’s life, known in his youth as Kvothe, through long sequences of flashbacks. Before you groan that you don’t care for this style of storytelling, I’ll admit that it’s not normally my favorite either. The book solidly hooked me through the events described above with the menacing evil. Kote intrigued me. His companion/apprentice/employee named Bast was also a huge draw given what Chronicler finds out about the handsome young man. So when the book just stops all that and whips us to the past when Kote was Kvothe, and young kid in essentially a Gypsy band of entertainers, I wasn’t so sure this book would be for me.

But then something…well, magical, happened. If I could have, I’d have stayed up and read all 736 pages in one sitting. The writing, I don’t know if I can do it justice. It is utterly, gobsmacking gorgeous. It didn’t matter if it was curmudgeony old men being curmudgeony with one another, or the days Kvothe spent becoming a legend at the University in Imre, or the horrid years he was in limbo in the poor-ridden section of Tarbean. In order to understand why Kvothe deserves the legendary description he has in the blurb above, we really do need to go back to what made him so. Makes perfect sense. And thus I was able to settle into a very long showing of his younger years.

Kvothe came from love. He was part of a group of traveling entertainers known as Edema Ruh. Kvothe’s mother and father were deeply in love and the entire troupe was like one big family. These years with his family show us a very smart young man, eager to learn ways not necessarily of his own people. When he meets an archanist named Abenthy, Kvothe’s true path is begun. Magic is what the boy’s been starving for, and Ben is his first mentor. Unfortunately, when Kvothe unknowingly calls the name of the wind, Abernathy realizes he might not be able to handle his impatient apprentice. Shortly after the old man leaves their troupe, the unthinkable happens, and Kvothe is left an orphan and the only survivor in his troupe. This leads to those horrific years in Tarbean, full of hunger and desolate survival. His great plans to become a University student at the Arcanum in Imre are dashed. Kvothe becomes a student of survival instead, eventually scrounging his way to Imre years later.

Getting somewhere in this book isn’t done in a particularly fast manner. The pace doesn’t really meander, it just explores almost every nook and cranny of Kvothe’s life. Fortunately, this is done with that magical writing of Rothfuss’ and in such a way that I thirsted for every detail. Yes, this eventually wore off. But not till much later in the book. I think with one this long you’re just bound to eventually want to glance through some parts to get to others.

I myself couldn’t get into Denna. She’s a young woman Kvothe meets on the caravan passage from Tarbean to Imre, after he finally manages to find a way out of his life of thievery and starvation. It’s really only at this point, when Kvothe’s fascination with her becomes the central driving force of the book, did I find myself getting bored. I found Denna herself pretty boring. Kvothe holds her in very high, romantic regard. And while I love a good romance in a fantasy read, I just didn’t get why she was so great. She was his first love, but still. Some details about her were sketchy even still by the end of the book, but from what I gathered, she uses her musical talents to try to gain patrons that will become a steady income for her. She would frequently disappear from Kvothe’s life though, and I gathered that it was because sometimes men would expect favors she refused to give them. Pretty alone, not friendly with many women even, it was possible to have a tad bit of sympathy for her. It’s just that, taken as a whole, Denna had little to no engaging personality. She and Kvothe do go off on their own small adventure at one point towards the end, but even then Denna came across as a helpless person that didn’t value Kvothe nearly as much as he did her. And by that point I was pretty invested in Kvothe’s character.

Having gotten that off my chest, I can assure you with all sincerity that I loved this book. From all the hype and love for it I got a sense of no hurry. I knew the second book was taking a while to release, which is fine, so I wasn’t in a rush to read this. But after realizing that I pretty much intentionally avoid hefty tomes, I decided this would be the first book to break that habit. People, I just can’t tell you enough how beautiful this writing is. It’s as close to a verbal depiction of a smoothly flowing river that I’ve ever seen. I’ve never read prose quite like this. It just drew me in, the cadence and the manner in which Kvothe tells his young life. I’ve never had a story shown to me quite like this.

Kvothe being our main character, with most of it being in first person as he flash backs to his past, gets most of the development, and rightly so. He’s bearing a heavy burden, as he knows who killed his family and must find them to set it aright. Rothfuss does switch to third person as the book occasionally switches back to the present where Kvothe is speaking to Chronicler or Bast or the villagers, but as the blurb implies, this is all about Kvothe. Can one character really pull all this off? I mean, yes, he interacts with plenty of other characters. There was Denna, his parents, his teacher Abenthy, and friends and professors at University. But the focus never wavers from him and I have to admit some surprise that he pulls it off.

The Name of The Wind is apparently day one of Kote the innkeeper telling his story to Chronicler, and there will be two more days/books in the series – which I didn’t realize was the theme of the series until Book Smuggler Ana explained it to me. Good thing, too, because I was left with a bit of suspense about what would happen with the awakened evil stalking Kote’s town. I’m one hundred percent invested in this series and I can’t wait now to continue with book two, The Wise Man’s Fear, in March 2011.

Rating: Four and Half Scoops