The Name of the Wind

‘It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man waiting to die.’

 Sometimes you write about something knowing fully well that is has been written about more times than you can count, better than you will ever be able to, and in a manner more creative than even your dreams.

This is one of those times.

You already know the story of The Name of the Wind. This is the first, most important thing about it. You know it, because it has been told to you throughout your life. You know, for example, the story of how a boy meets a girl and falls in love. You know the way that a hero saves a town from being burned down by dragons. You know how a young man, down on his luck, finds the murderer before he can kill his next victim. You know this, and you know more than this. But this story tells you again, and makes you wonder if you ever really knew those stories.

But I will try my best to not tell you anything concrete about the story at all. Though you know it, though it is inscribed in you from childhood, to tell you the story would be a sin.

Which leaves me stuck with the unique problem of telling you about a story without, in fact, telling you about the story. But how to do that? It is as Gaiman said: ‘One describes the tale best by telling the tale.’

So let me tell you not about the tale, but the writing of the tale. Rothfuss has a chilling ability, as evinced by that deadly line above, to evoke emotions in you. Imagine a line like that, ‘the patient cut-flower sound of a man waiting to die’.  

He has a striking, stupefying ability to make you feel. He writes poems and leaves them hidden in his books like acorns in the winter ground. When you find them, they are old oak trees, and their roots flow through the entire story.

How odd to watch a mortal kindle
Then to dwindle day by day.
Knowing their bright souls are tinder
And the wind will have its way.
Would I could my own fire lend.
What does your flickering portend?

Oh but he writes achingly (aching is a good word for it. It tugs at you, and leaves you with a faint sensation that something somewhere hurts, but in a good way that betrays that sometimes sadness is uplifting).

He writes of love:

‘We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That’s as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.’

Of the road:

‘No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.’

And of music:

‘Music is there for when words fail us.’

He writes of these things because he knows them as well as you and I know them, and he can write about them better than anyone else I know. Let me be very serious: Patrick Rothfuss inspires more in me than almost any other writer I have read. His ability with words is matched, perhaps, by ten others alive today. And so, I cannot take from you that first encounter with him, when he weaves a story like the most patient master weaver: with painstaking care and deeply complex craft and insurmountable amounts of love.

So I hope to cheat, and not actually tell you the tale, and instead talk of how he writes. I hope to leave for you breadcrumbs that form a trail of words. And the trail will lead you there, to The Name of the Wind.

What is the point of telling you about it this in this manner? The point is that if you have not read this book, then maybe you will now read it. Maybe you will read it, and in that case I hope you enjoy it (no, I know you will enjoy it). And if (when) you do enjoy it, I really hope you tell me, because man, this book is great.

It deserves to be read, and loved, and shouted about from the mountaintops.

Here it is, my mountaintop.

Ocean At The End of the Lane

Which is a book by Neil Gaiman

My least favorite thing about this book is that it has turned Neil Gaiman into a pop star. In my mind, he went from being indie and poor to a stadium-concert-level rockstar and it's annoying the hell out of me. </snob> (I know perfectly well that he was pretty famous even before this book. Psh.) My most favorite thing about this book is that it deals with one of the most interesting contradictions; of the magicness of magic.

Most good fantasy deals with it in one way or the other: that it exists, and people who don't know this are just not cool enough to be in on it; or that it is so in your face that it's not really magic anymore. Neil Gaiman takes a third route with his latest.

He sets it up by telling his story as a flashback. An adult is visiting the town he grew up in, walks to the end of the lane where his best friend used to live, meets her mother and gets talking. As he is talking, he is allowed to remember what really/"really" happened to them as children. By the middle of the book, you know why it's a Neil Gaiman book.

You know it because he has expertly managed to trick you into assuming that he is telling the first kind of fantasy story (in which you only know about magic because you're that cool) and then suddenly makes the switch into the second kind of fantasy story (in which everything is so magical anyway that it's not really magic anymore).

About three quarters in, you have no idea what you're dealing with. You don't know what sort of world this is set in, you don't know if you're meant to know, you don't know if it's just the delirium of a man at a funeral (although, if we're guessing, somebody's surely on something.) But the truth is, you're so into the magic of the book itself that you don't want to think of it in any other way. At least, that's the way it was for me.

He lays out this first contradiction alongside the adult/child contradiction in the flashback (that it is essentially an adult telling a child's story). What the adult assumes, a child questions. What the child knows, the adult is undecided. This is important in this context, because most of us have it all the time. You are taught to demagick yourself as you grow up. You start to see the world differently. The way you saw it as a child is either forgotten or dismissed. You never once think like that again. (I'm not even slightly comparing, but the best set of books that brings out this contradiction is Pullman's His Dark Materials.)

So read it, and tell me what you think!