What I said a couple of weeks ago:
It's a big dumb epic fantasy sequel ... and I can't wait!
What I say now:
It's bigger than I ever expected (200 pages longer than Anna Karenina!). And, unfortunately, dumber than I expected.
Legendary magician/lutist/killer/wastrel Kvothe has faked his own death and is now the proprietor of a sleepy pub (with a murderous fairy for an apprentice). After being tracked down by a scribe, Kvothe is convinced to tell the story of his life, which he promises to do over the course of three days. Rothfuss' first book, The Name of the Wind, was day one, in which Kvothe covered his childhood, the murder of his parents by mysterious supernatural beings, his entrance to a University of magic, and his all-round precociousness. The Wise Man's Fear is day two of the story.
I don't ask a heck of a lot from a popular novel like this: all I really want is something with a strong plot that's easy to read, something that goes down smooth. I chose this after Anna Karenina to give my brain a break.
For a guy working in a popular genre like fantasy, Rothfuss can write a hell of a sentence. His prose is elegant, clear and far more imaginative than 99% of his fantasy-writing peers. He draws you in beautifully ... which makes his occasional lapses into first-year-creative-writing-student gauche-ness stand out a mile. I'm willing to forgive a bit of experimentation, but why oh why does that major new character speak with no capital letters in her dialogue? it's utterly pointless. and after a while, really annoying. maybe it's because she's a fairy ... but wait, kvothe's apprentice is a fairy, and his dialogue has capitals. so there's no reason, then? right-o.
And why does Kvothe suddenly get hazy on his details for about fifty pages? Okay, he clearly has the best memory in the world, but whatever, I'm willing to go with that ... then we hit a section that's so vague as to be painful to read, and given the perfect clarity of everything else, it's like I was suddenly reading a very different, and much lesser, book.
But hell, given that the book's 993 pages long, those are relatively minor quibbles. My major quibble is that the vast majority of those 993 pages didn't seem to need to be there! The first 300 pages or so simply re-do a whole bunch of stuff that was included in the first book, to the point that I was getting deja vu. It was all mildly different variations on the exact same themes. The last thing a page-turner should be is dull, and while I was flying through it, I did find myself getting irritated at the sameness of Kvothe's adventures.
Then, when he did leave the University to head off into the wide world, all the troubles he found had very little connection to each other, and didn't join together to create a story. Rothfuss is a talented enough writer that he could keep me interested in whatever given piece of plot was going on at the time, but at the end of the book all the pieces of the plot didn't add up to anything. The book essentially goes like this: "I did that, then I did that, then I did that, then I did that. The end." All of the 'thats' are perfectly fine in and of themselves, but they bear little to no relation to each other. I was left flat and emotionally un-engaged, because nothing ever really seemed to matter, or to affect anything else.
All in all, it was (for the most part) a pleasant enough time-killer, but absolutely nothing more. I'd forgotten most of it before I'd even finished. Oh well.
Cheers, JC.
about to read: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ... continuing my recent Russian obsession. And it's blessedly short!
books to go: 110
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