The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

Jamesaritchie

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I read it last year and discovered that Rothfuss worked on it for something like 14 years(if I remember correctly) and it shows.

For me, this was one of my complaints. The long writing time did show, but not, for me, in a good way.
 

johnhallow

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I liked the second book, but Kvothe went from "Mary Sue-averting unreliable narrator" to straight-up Mary Sue.

Oy vey! When will the Mary Sue witch hunt end?

IMHO, a Mary Sue is not a Mary Sue if the character works. I also like characters who are brilliant for whatever reason, like Artemis Fowl, Matilda, etc. because I admire competency and protagonists who've, to put it crudely, got their shit together :D I'd love to see more of that in fiction. But I do see what you mean :D
 

lorna_w

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^ some agreement there. Back in my day, before internet memes and the whole Mary Sue business, what we wanted was a character that was "larger than life." Think Jack Reacher: realistic? No, not a bit. Fun to read? Totally. (and, repeating what I've said before on the board, hot to us women of a certain age.) For genre fiction, heroic fiction, I still think in these terms. Only realistic family dramatists and coming of age novelists need worry about the Mary Sue issue. You want Aragorn and Gandalf to not be heroic? Whatever for?
 

rwm4768

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I liked The Name of the Wind too. I haven't read Wise Man's Fear yet, though. While reading NOTW, there were actually times when I forgot it was first-person, which is good since I'm not a huge fan of first-person, especially in epic fantasy.
 

Amadan

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There's "heroic" and there's "Sixteen-year-old virgin boffs a faerie sex goddess so well she can't tell he's a virgin." :p
 

Dreity

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There's "heroic" and there's "Sixteen-year-old virgin boffs a faerie sex goddess so well she can't tell he's a virgin." :p

What he said. :p

I still enjoyed Wise Man's Fear quite a lot, and plan to read Doors of Stone, but I definitely wasn't as enthralled with it as I was with NOTW. I feel like he spent way more pages with the Felurian than the encounter warranted, and the Adem's thoughts on the reproductive process really made maintaining my suspension of disbelief difficult.

Interesting that the two largest detractors from the book also didn't affect the plot in any way. Actually, I guess the last 20 pages or so of the Felurian stuff revealed some important stuff. But yeah, 20 pages out of what felt like hundreds.
 

Filigree

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Rothfuss got noticed first by winning Writers of the Future with a self-contained chunk of 'Name of the Wind'. It's a pretty good novel, even for the length. I don't fault the long writing time, because it permits a level of worldbuilding that fast-written short novels just cannot sustain.

I rolled my eyes a bit at the cardboard female characters. I haven't read the sequel, and might not bother with the series.

Rothfuss is fun on con panels, I'll give that.
 

Raventongue

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I read it, finished it, and decided definitively I would not be wasting my time on anything else by Rothfuss.

I was led to believe it would subvert the crap out of every fantasy trope in a totally non-humorous way and blow my mind. Instead, I think most of the "subversions" were actually pretty standard fantasy explanation fare. I didn't emotionally connect to any of the characters.

I'm not a Mary Sue inquisitor, but come on. Kvothe made me want to vomit.

Of course, most of the people I know who love this also love a lot of other authors I don't like: Robert Jordan, George R. R. Martin, Terry Goodkind, etc. Ugh. It's not a matter of length at all (actually, I'm not so into the tight writing craze), just content.
 

cjcurrie

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I read it, finished it, and decided definitively I would not be wasting my time on anything else by Rothfuss.

I was led to believe it would subvert the crap out of every fantasy trope in a totally non-humorous way and blow my mind. Instead, I think most of the "subversions" were actually pretty standard fantasy explanation fare. I didn't emotionally connect to any of the characters.

I'm not a Mary Sue inquisitor, but come on. Kvothe made me want to vomit.

Of course, most of the people I know who love this also love a lot of other authors I don't like: Robert Jordan, George R. R. Martin, Terry Goodkind, etc. Ugh. It's not a matter of length at all (actually, I'm not so into the tight writing craze), just content.

It's definitely a genre thing. Most of my own love for those characters comes from the relationship my father and I had – he would read these books and share them with me, and we both thought they were great stories :)

Regardless, the market for Rothfuss's work exists. I found it because a clerk at Barnes and Noble recommended it to me. As an adult, it's a love-hate relationship I have with the Kingkiller.
 

Dreity

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I read it, finished it, and decided definitively I would not be wasting my time on anything else by Rothfuss.

I was led to believe it would subvert the crap out of every fantasy trope in a totally non-humorous way and blow my mind. Instead, I think most of the "subversions" were actually pretty standard fantasy explanation fare. I didn't emotionally connect to any of the characters.

I'm not a Mary Sue inquisitor, but come on. Kvothe made me want to vomit.

Of course, most of the people I know who love this also love a lot of other authors I don't like: Robert Jordan, George R. R. Martin, Terry Goodkind, etc. Ugh. It's not a matter of length at all (actually, I'm not so into the tight writing craze), just content.

Haha, I actually really don't care for Robert Jordan or Terry Goodkind, and I think George R. R. Martin manages to make an absolutely fascinating story read like a history textbook. In fact, I'm sure that the part of the reason I thought Rothfuss's prose was so beautiful and lyrical was because I had just finished slogging through books 1-4 of ASOIAF. The contrast was astounding. So I do agree that it's a matter of content, not length, but for different reasons it seems. :p

I do acknowledge your others points, though. The promise of The Great Deconstruction is the main reason I'm putting up with the Mary Sue-ness.

I just love discussions like this. Really makes you see appreciate how wildly different people's perspectives can be. :D
 

Tex_Maam

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^ some agreement there. Back in my day, before internet memes and the whole Mary Sue business, what we wanted was a character that was "larger than life." Think Jack Reacher: realistic? No, not a bit. Fun to read? Totally. (and, repeating what I've said before on the board, hot to us women of a certain age.) For genre fiction, heroic fiction, I still think in these terms. Only realistic family dramatists and coming of age novelists need worry about the Mary Sue issue. You want Aragorn and Gandalf to not be heroic? Whatever for?

I'm up for heroic!

To me, what makes Kvothe - or anyone - a Mary Sue isn't that he has eleventeen special-awesome bonus-features, but that *everyone who isn't evil thinks he's amazing.* That's what kills the suspension of disbelief for me. Because in the real world, no matter how legitimately one-of-a-kind talented someone is, there is ALWAYS someone else who will say "yeah, Stephen Hawking is a real dick." And a whole lot more someones to whom he just doesn't matter at all.

Naturally, you don't expect that latter group to figure prominently in a first-person narrative. Still, I'd have liked it better if those other boys at the University had had more to say than "oh Kvothe, you're so cool and rad - let me show off my defining quirk and then get out of your way."

Tolkien did a terrific job of creating a world much larger than any single event or person, and I think one of the marks of a mature writer is being secure enough in the appeal of your hero to not only let him share the spotlight with other characters, but to let said others shrug or sneer or occasionally flip him the bird.
 

Drey of Boon

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To me, what makes Kvothe - or anyone - a Mary Sue isn't that he has eleventeen special-awesome bonus-features, but that *everyone who isn't evil thinks he's amazing.* That's what kills the suspension of disbelief for me.

This.

In Wise Man's Fear his buddies seemed to do nothing else other than sit around waiting for Kvothe to need them. They'd drop whatever they were doing to fawn over him, and so I never saw them as real characters. Or maybe I just need some better friends!

I did love NOTW. Stunning prose and a beautifully constructed world that quite clearly existed well beyond the frame of whatever scene you were reading. The plot wasn't what I'd call rollicking, but I could see a far bigger story playing out and so I was happy to be patient; I've read plenty of fantasy doorstoppers. The whole dragon tangent made me pause, though. Kind of stood out and didn't seem to serve much purpose.

And then I read Wise Man's Fear, and unfortunately the plot just stopped. The detail that I used to love now bugged me. It felt like I was just reading a daily account of someone at university. And after about half the book I stumbled across some reviews that implied it didn't get much better and so I just had to stop. Maybe I missed out on a barnstorming second half, but I just didn't have the time or energy to find out.
 

Camilla Delvalle

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Since I read this recently, I can make some comments.

The story about Kvothe in school was the main story. The other setting was a way to tell this story. That's how I perceived it.

The magic was cool.

The villains were cool.

I have no complaints about D., though I rooted for Auri, the girl in the cellar. There were also some clues that she is a powerful mage, and I thought she would become Kvothe's main teacher after he was rejected by Elodin. Though a friend of mine said that she is too weird to be in a stable relationship.

What I disliked was Kvothe's cruelty. A least three times he did things that were so evil or violent that it made me wince. I often like villains, but Kvothe is marketed as good, and the author does not seem to be aware of how cruel Kvothe is. He is no Harry Potter. More like Tom Riddle.

Then there's the things he did in Trebon. That didn't feel ok at all, from an environmentalist perspective. One might say that he was forced to do it, but to some degree he created the dangerous situation himself.

Overall the book was decent. It just didn't impress in any way. The worldbuilding was not as full as Tolkien's, the city life was not as rich as Dickens', the dialogue was not as lively as Tolstoy's, the characters and stories were not as varied as Martin's, the school was not as fantastic as Hogwarts, and so on. That's what I was thinking when reading.
 

Menyanthana

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Kvothe is a Mary Sue, absolutely, and I think the book would be a lot better if he weren't in it. The worldbuilding suffices, and I find some of the characters nice.

What made me angry is the portrayal of women. I didn't notice it in "Name of the Wind", but it was obvious in the sequel.

-Felurian: Allegedly a mysterious fairy of immeasurable power. And then, Kvothe, a 16 year old, manages to get hold of her true name, or whatever he was that made him think he could destroy her. Okay. Had he killed her that way, it would have been bad, but nothing worse than his Mary Sue-ness before.
But no! She sets him free because she can't live without his admiration! That's just so damn stupid. She's so damn stupid. He's a boy who had sex for the first time, and it was good, and she buys that he isn't overwhelmed because he hadn't enough sex with other women? How stupid is that?
Even taking into account that she's a fairy and all that - she's bound to know something about men if her whole life consists of seducing and killing them. (That's stupid, too - I hope we get an explanation for that in the third book ... then again, I hope not, as I fear it will be worse)

Later, we learn that women are instruments for Kvothe to play. Nothing more. And not only does he tell us that, he even defends himself by stating that it's okay because objectifying women is okay as long as you love the object enough. Sadly, the author's blog proves that this is not just Kvothe being a sexist teen boy, it's the author being sexist.

-the Adem: They could be interesting. But instead of actually showing their culture, Rothfuss concentrates on the fact that they have a lot of sex.
And all of them are beautiful. And heterosexual. Or at least those who are important. Carceret might be a lesbian.
I am not impressed by the "men are not important" talky-talky. This is not a matriarchy.It's a matrilineal society, yes, but that is not the same thing. Men are shown to do everything women do - especially and most important, fighting. Men can be breadwinners in this society. Women are considered to be superior fighters, yes, but this is never shown to have any real consequences. The first Adem we meet is a man!
And, most important, Adem women don't seem to hold the opinion (as they would if they lived in a matriarchy) that their looks don't matter. Those who are too ugly for Kvothe don't approach him, so apparently, they're ashamed of their uglyness.
Also, there are no homosexual men who want him, even though one would expect that, if sex is considered to be as intimate as a handshake, almost everyone would be bisexual.
Oh, and then their stupid ideas about human reproduction. Even if most people are bisexual, there would, probably, be some lesbians, or at least asexuals. Who would notice that, whatever they try, they can't become pregnant.

All the women in this book are just there to serve Kvothe. Either to have sex with him or to illustrate just how much he respects women. This is a problem because I got the impression he doesn't respect women as people, he respects them as one would "respect" a beautiful object, a great work of art.

One could argue that men (who aren't Kvothe) aren't treated much better, but that doesn't make it okay. It's still bad writing.


Regarding Denna, I don't get why people hate her so much. Okay, she's objectified, but so is every other woman in the book. Since I don't identify with Kvohte, it doesn't bother me in the least that she runs away from him.
She seems to be in love with him, but I can forgive that; sometimes, love just happens.
 

RemaCaracappa

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I liked Name of the Wind. Liked it a lot. I may never have picked it up had a good friend not thrown it at me about a year ago. (Never heard of it before that, don't remember ever seeing it in the stores.)

I bought my own copy about halfway through, and bough Wise Man's Fear, though I haven't read it yet (you don't want to see my to-read list...)

That said, I can totally see all of the faults mentioned here.

I had an amusing moment while reading the book on a bus one night, a couple of guys saw me reading it and one yells out "are you reading Name of the Wind"? That's so hot, I've never seen a girl reading that book!"