The Name of the Wind review

I'm not really even sure how to start describing how much I loved this book, but I think that they best introduction I can give it is this: that sneaking in bits of it chapter by chapter for the past week wasn't enough for me, so I stayed up through a long, cold night to be able to read this book in it's entirety. This here means that not only did I finish the book in one evening, but that I started the book over after having already gotten halfway through it in order to read it all in once sitting. A proper reading.

I did not expect to like The Name of the Wind when I first began it. I had just finished a novel that seemed to be in a similar vein and wasn't eager to start another book about magic and older worlds than our own. Regardless, I began to read, and discovered that I seemed to have forgotten how good books start by simply beginning. "It was night again."

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss is in my mind, a perfect novel (and is also Rothfuss' debut novel, as well as it is the first in a trilogy). This story begins at Waystone Inn, introducing the main character without crediting him as such, or even sharing his name. Kote, the Innkeeper, is a man who knows the name of the wind, and the names of many other things as well. He was not always Kote, and in this story, he is mostly known as Kvothe. After a series of abnormal events, Kvothe is compelled by Bast and Chronicler to tell his story, and what a story it is...

Kvothe's story takes place in a world where dragons exist, though most consider them to be myth, where demons are real and walk among men, where traveling Ruh and other troupers make their livings on the roads, and where Arcanists can call the wind with a single word. I fear that saying much else would ruin the twists and turns the book takes from chapter to chapter, and the adventurous feelings along the way.

I love this book. If it were not for the fact that I am desperately eager to move on the the second book in the trilogy, I would re-read The Name of the Wind once more, simply for the sake of being back inside of a perfect story. The book was neither too long nor too short. It was perfectly long enough to hold the first part of an epic tale, and no longer. The writing style was superb. Rothfuss seems to invent his own languages throughout the novel ("Hylta tiam"), as well as he conveys through phonetics different accents ("Dain't be afeerd. Tae wain't baet."). In addition to all that, an entire mythology is created; a set for religious foundation, and another for childhood fantasy. The story builds upon itself and the mythos told within it. But this is not a story about a man who changed his name, or about a boy who grew up, or about a teen who fell in love, or about any other single thing on it's own. The Name of the Wind is about a man named Kvothe and how and why and when and how he came to learn the name of the wind and it is possibly the best story I have ever read.

The story continues in Wise Man's Fear. Check out Wise Man's Fear review.

/ [Nioniel]

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