bironic

Two people from two different parts of my life enthusiastically recommended this fantasy novel by Patrick Rothfuss, the first in a trilogy called The Kingkiller Chronicle that hasn't yet been completed.

Slow start, but intriguing. Then it turned out the first 50 pages were only there to set up a situation in which the main character, Kvothe, the greatest arcanist alive, is going to tell his life story to a scribe. There followed 600 pages of earning a blackout on the Gary Stu Bingo card. The proper pronunciation of his name! His striking red hair, the changing shades of his green eyes! His Batman-tragic childhood! His incredible precocious talent and brilliance! He is the best at almost everything he tries! Those around him love or hate him and are never indifferent! He is so alone and misunderstood! The woman he falls in love with is the most beautiful and enigmatic in the realm, whom all other men wish they could be with! Drama follows him everywhere he goes! The great misery of the world in the present-day narrative is all his fault! We do not hear any details about other people's lives that don't revolve around him! And it's told in the first person to top it all off.

He says charming things like: "I was brilliant. Not just your run-of-the-mill brillance either. I was extraordinarily brilliant."

My friends' praises convinced me to give the book more patience than I would have otherwise, and despite the above, I'm generally glad I did. The story picked up around 225 pages in when young Kvothe went to university. Whether that's because the pacing improved or because I identified more with an academic success fantasy is hard to tell. It's just that my enjoyment of the competence kink and my desire to find out how Kvothe achieved The Thing he's most famous for were tested by his being so everything. He gets called out sometimes for his arrogance and his Gryffindor tendency to leap before looking, and punished sometimes for breaking rules, but he almost always gets off easy. And while often he is (so) clever and resourceful, he's also unpredictably thick and self-defeating. He's driven to learn all he can about one particular spoilery thing, yet he makes choices that hamper his ability to achieve that goal. Frustrating.

Kvothe's rapidly cycling financial solvency, the way he struggles to stay one step ahead of total destitution and doesn't always manage to do so, was an interesting difference from a lot of other SF/F stories I've read.

Little things bugged me on a prose level. Rothfuss uses too many similes. Kvothe and a faerie friend have an inexplicable tendency to say each other's names in every line when they converse. There were some typos and comma splices, and whoever proofread this book did not understand plural possessives, so it's all "my parent's tent" and "the villager's fear." On the other hand, there was some fun stuff with a country dialect (for example, calling pigs: "Loo, peg! Peg peg peg.") and with making fun of bad poetry.

"What do you know of poetry?" Ambrose said without bothering to turn around.

"I know a limping verse when I hear it," I said. "But this isn't even limping. A limp has rhythm. This is more like someone falling down a set of stairs."

But the main thing was that the beginning of the story set up a mystery -- the reason the scribe is so keen to record Kvothe's life -- that kept me turning the pages... only to discover that it's not going to be explained until a later book. IF YOUR STORY IS ABOUT HOW CHARACTER X DID Y, AND YOUR BOOK IS 662 PAGES LONG, I WANT THE ANSWER BY PAGE 662. Ugh. Tell me a complete story. Or, barring that, at least a complete segment with one significant step of the ultimate goal achieved. Then if I like your story, I will trust you enough to read another complete story in the sequel. Enough of this bloated cliffhanger business. Kvothe's story is no Lord of the Rings or Song of Ice and Fire epic that necessitates 2,500+ pages.

...Says the person who's going to pick up the second book at the library today to see if The Thing finally gets described.

I'm really surprised it has a 4.55 rating on Goodreads. The reviewers I agreed with gave it two or three stars.