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Just finished the audiobook today (sadly not read in Zap Brannigan's voice, but the narration was overall quite good). My own reaction mirrors a lot of the responses in this thread; I enjoyed the book, but I'm much better able to articulate what I didn't like versus what I did. I really want to believe that Kvothe is an unreliable narrator, but there's not a great deal of evidence to support it, and actually a fair bit against, as other people have mentioned. It's a shame, because thematically the book really set itself up well to explore the idea of legend vs personal mythos vs truth/reality, and squandered it entirely. I grant that the flashback part of the story isn't finished yet, but for a bildungsroman there's precious little character development either. He acquires things (enters the university, gets friends, earns money) but Kvothe in the final chapters doesn't really behave any differently than he would of at the beginning. He still would have been white-knightey, tried to save the town from the dragon, acted the same at the final expulsion hearing, etc at the beginning of the story, because he starts out as such a smarty-pants Mary Sue/Good Guy. It's not that he doesn't make any mistakes, but they're all because of his youthful naivete, and as he is a young character, it's easy for the reader to nod sympathetically and say "Oh, well he wouldn't have known any better". Between those obligatory setbacks however, the plot often feels hollow and devoid of tension as he coasts through conflict after conflict with his superior genius and natural talent. As a parting shot, Denna doesn't work at all as a love interest (and his skin-crawlingly creepy attitude towards her can probably be taken at face value), and Bast comes off as a cringe-inducingly annoying anime sidekick. Despite all this, I still enjoyed the book. While overwraught in places, the quality of the prose was pretty good, and the breaks for the frame narrative did a good job of heightening some of the tension of Kvothe's story while introducing a much more interesting plague of demons plotline. I actually didn't mind the whole "money problems" aspect of Kvothe's; it's not something you commonly see in a fantasy novel, and it's relatable. Finally, while I don't think Rothfuss has some mindbending reveal up his sleeve that will retroactively make Name of the Wind a masterpiece, he still has some room to maneuver with Kvothe's character, and from the hints he's dropped in the book (plus that review of the next one linked a few posts back) it sounds like he's probably going to be going in the right direction. It probably won't be my favorite series of all-time or anything, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and read on. uberkeyzer posted:I totally understand this argument and empathized with it until i read about 20 pages of the transformers 2 thread in Cinema Discusso and saw it trotted out about five million to defend jive-shuckin' robots with TRUCK BALLSs, and realized it can be used to defend the indefensible. Can't resist posting this gem: SuperMechaGodzilla posted:[Armond] White isn't a troll. He very sincerely loves "bad" movies for their ability to troll. This is a very crucial difference.
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Dec 30, 2010 01:06
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gently caress,MarshallX posted:*Read 3 pages* was exactly what I did when I got to that part. I don't really know why or how I keep reading Rothfuss, I think a part of me misses being younger and enjoying books like this, and the rest of it is my almost pathological completionism. You can tell he really loves to write and it's easy enough to just sort of follow the story along and get a mild enjoyment out of reading it, but it's seldom very suspenseful and certain parts of it are some of the most   poo poo I've ever read in my life, to the point where I'm sure I'm being trolled. I think it bugs me most that there is the kernel of an awesome story in there, but Rothfuss seems to run with it in the opposite direction most of the time. I'm tempted to leave a Post-It note in it somewhere around page 632 (it's a library book) with a big  and instructions to skip ahead to the tree, then skip ahead to the inn. I will read the next thousand-page doorstop to see how it ends. Liesmith posted:I don't think comparing one set of fantasy novels to another set of fantasy novels fits any definition of blasphemy that I've ever heard. There's an almost peerlessly  atheist joke in here, but I'm too hungover to take a stab at it.
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May 6, 2011 22:38
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The Supreme Court posted:Anyways, quite a few bits made up for that: the stabbing bandits. This reminds me: wouldn't that be pretty much cut-and-dried malfeasance? Like, the kind that would get him burned at the stake (or whatever the equivalent punishment is), regardless of who he was attacking? He obviously got away with it, but wonder if it could come back to haunt him in the next book.
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May 8, 2011 18:43
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