The Name of the Wind

by David Cohen

The Name of the Wind
Author – Patrick Rothfuss
Publisher – DAW 2008
Official Website – http://www.patrickrothfuss.com/content/index.asp

Despite all the attention and my being personally acquainted with the author, I held off for several years on getting around to reading Patrick Rothfuss’s Name of the Wind. I kept track of its being in development for a long time, but when it went to print and even started being very critically acclaimed, there were a lot of books that I was more interested in reading. I realized afterward that I had fallen into the trap of subconsciously thinking that a book by someone that you know, even if released by a major publisher and is on the New York Times Bestseller’s list, has to be kind of amateurish. I found that I was very mistaken.

At one point after having read a short excerpt from the series and a few pages from the first novel, I thought that the main character was too much of a thinly disguised heroic alter-ego for the author to live vicariously through. But that is a mistake that can be made when you know the author personally as you are reading the story through the context of the person that you know. I saw the hero, Kvothe, as this “perfect” action hero who cannot be fooled or beat and I even once compared the character to James Bond while talking with Pat, and for that I hereby publicly apologize.

People who live in central Wisconsin who have not taken the book seriously because Pat is from Stevens Point are doing themselves a great disservice. Rothfuss has woven a very vivid and intricate tale of sophisticated fantasy. I had heard numerous times that the novel was being compared to Harry Potter and that made me kind of snicker. Knowing that the novel was “heroic fantasy” more closely in the vein of Terry Brooks or Dragonlance, thought that the only people who would make the comparison with Harry Potter would be those who have not any fantasy novels other than Harry Potter. However, I now see why that comparison is made as The Name of the Wind, also involves an academic setting for magic and a boy studying there while making friends and enemies. The academic setting also has its own intricate set of rules and is a world unto itself, like Potter’s Hogwarts. However, the similarities really end there as The Name of the Wind is not for children or twits. Hearing the comparison with Harry Potter probably also scared me off as I like my fantasy hard and straight-up and I tend to avoid things that have that much hype around them as they usually are not very good. Don’t let yourself make the same mistake however.

All of us who were Dungeons & Dragons kids (or adults as the case may be) have at some point made a really cool character that is usually a reflection of some part of our personality. We have ideas about that character in our heads and now that we’ve made him or her, we just need to send them on their fictional journey. The only problem is that the details of that journey our pretty vague and we aren’t really sure where to send them. For Rothfuss, this is not a problem. He somehow channels the very life of his character as though he lived it himself. It is enough to make an aspiring writer consumed with envy, but this is also something that only happens when reading work by someone you know.

At times, the story is a bit too detailed. Around page 600 or so, the story starts to feel a bit drawn out. However, over all it is engaging and has a unique mythology. It is not at all a stereotypical fantasy story with the quest for the magical item. It is the story of an extraordinary man in an extraordinary place. The world of the story is even made more believable by having magic being an elusive science and there are not demihuman creatures running around. While Gnomes and Elves are kind of missed as an enjoyable part of a fantasy story, not having them there makes the world a little more real and refreshing. While the book gets long at times toward the end, as I noted earlier, it still creates a yearning for the next book to come out.