The Name of the Wind Review
“It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts… It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending; it was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.”
So begins The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. It is a great, big book that is the first part of a great, big, as-yet unfinished story. And when summer turns to fall, mind goes back to the Waystone Inn, and to Kvothe, who owns it, and I find myself wanting to get lost in this great, big silence again. The majority of the book takes place over the course of a day in which Kvothe tells the first part of his life story. Once I started, I got lost in it almost immediately.
The Name of the Wind has been remarked upon for its similarity to Harry Potter, usually framed as: What if Harry Potter were set in college, not high school? And there’s some validity to that analogy. The protagonist is a tragedy-struck young man who wants to learn magic, learn about the world, and learn about the mysterious force that attacked his family in childhood. After years of hardship, he finds himself at the University, ready to explore the arcane secrets of the world…
So, yes, I see the comparison. But in my opinion, the real question that the book dares to answer is: What if Harry Potter were GOOD at things?
No slight to Harry, of course. It’s just that he was rather deliberately created to be bad at everything except running directly at danger and Expelliarmus. But Kvothe is similarly grief-stricken, similarly an outsider, and similarly sympathetic. But he’s also spectacularly talented: a spectacular student, musician, actor, magician, thief, woodsman, and, perhaps most importantly, a truly spectacular idiot.
People forget that. Readers will complain sometimes that Kvothe is too good at too many things, and that it spoils the tension of the book, but what they often overlook is that in between his fun feats of genius, Kvothe is constantly making enemies, scaring away potential allies, and taking ridiculous, impetuous risks that are adding up like debts in a ledger. And that’s as fun to read about as the time he used a voodoo doll on a teacher and got promoted a few grades for doing it. Apologies for the minor spoiler. You needed something for the comparison.
Patrick Rothfuss worked on this book for over a decade before it was published, and it shows: some of the sentences in this book were laid as carefully as pieces of stained-glass in a cathedral window, and they have a similar ability to move you to big feelings or an understanding of your own smallness, like the one I listed above. The world feels wide and full, like you could call Rothfuss up at 2:00AM to ask him what the hell is going on in a country called Ceald and he could walk you through the niceties like explaining where he keeps his spare keys. But it’s also cozy. Once you get to the university, you don’t really want to leave. You want to learn more about it, and the people who call it home, and the nights at the taverns.
As I said, the book is long, and it’s a long and winding road. But if you’re a fan of fantasy, and if you enjoy a book that can take you far away, I strongly recommend this one. I also strongly recommend the audiobook as read by Nick Podehl, who wraps the entire world in his soothing voice and gives the characters heart and substance.
I give The Name of the Wind three silences out of three.