The Name of the Wind

Here we go, my friends. I had this on my to-read list for years and I still avoided going for it because of multiple reason. One, it's long. It takes a considerable amount of time to just go through it. Two... damn, this thing is hyped. The best thing since sliced bread, it will make you cry and name your first child Kvothe regardless of gender. It will give you an identity crisis. Hurr durr. Three, Rothfuss did many things that just rub me the wrong way. If we met I would be polite, as I always am, but I doubt we would click. This shouldn't matter all that much, but it does, I guess. Dunno.
One reason I don't care about is it not being finished. I will say this, I don't think the series will ever be finished at this point and I don't care. I care about him not just being honest about it, but yeah.

Kvothe is perfect, so much so I started mentally calling him Inspirational Kvothe. Right now he is hiding as an innkeeper in some small village. Cozy, right? It is, he does innkeeper-y things and hangs out with his student and sole employee, a goat-legged dude, Bast, who is kind of dumb, but hey, he is supernatural.
Then one day... a Chronicler shows up, having heard the legends of Kvothe. So he decides to tell his true and unabridged or whatever story. Here we go.
He grew up in a travelling troupe, things happened, he went to magic university, met a chick. That's about this book. Thanks, bye.

So. I feel that for a first book this was fine. Yes, just fine. I won't call it brilliant or groundbreaking or even all that special, because it just isn't. The prose is often going into purple territory, the story itself is nowhere near as clever as it is intended to be. The characters.... oooooh, man. No, the characters are probably the weakest part of this thing.
All in all, I have zero clue how it managed to make people believe it's some sort of a marvel of fantasy literature. I guess some of the very end of the book explains it; if you fake it long enough eventually it will become truth or whatever. I don't know. I do know that it isn't brilliant, though. I don't want to say it disappointed me, because I had a feeling it wasn't going to become my absolute favourite, but still. I am not head over heals in love with this thing.
Damn, was it long. Everything that happened could have been written 30-50% shorter and we wouldn't have missed much.

Lets go back to Inspirational Kvothe. I personally don't find an inherent issue with power fantasies if they are somewhat balanced and if they don't try to seem more than what they are. In this case... it's rough. Kvothe is the type of character that somehow manages to fall upwards every single time, but also he is an idiot in the sense that he just can't freaking concentrate on any of the miraculous things he gets. He gets into magic school. Yay? Well, lets just waste time on chasing a girl who just can't be bothered to do anything, really. He has a special skill he can use to earn money (music), but he refuses to just work diligently and instead gets distracted every five minutes by some shit. Every single time I felt we were taking a step forward Kvothe's pigeon brain just went some other way, because lulz.
Talking about special skills. Inspiration Kvothe is good at everything and is so without much of an effort. He can miss YEARS of practising on his lute and with just a bit of the equivalent of sullenly playing Wonderwall he is back in shape and perfect. Because he feels it in his feeling place and you are not a musician, so you won't get it. No riding horses in years? Pfft, 60 miles in a day and he is only a bit stiff. Spent a couple months with some woodsman when he was like 8? In a dream all the info about surviving in the wild is back.
We also have the thing where everyone who is not nice to him on day 1 turns out to be an evil person who will keep trying to ruin his life. Because you can detect assholes by seeing how they react to Kvothe.

Now we reached the point where we will talk about his love interest, Denna. Ohhhh, Denna.
I find it incredibly funny when people who claim to be such woman respecting feminists and so acutely aware of all the recent opinion about that write the Dennas of the world.
She is awful. Of course Denna is the single most perfect woman ever, she is so gorgeous and talented and smart and just everything. So everything. So much so men talk about her between themselves and STILL feel the need to white knight and M'lady her. Other women all hate her because she is just flawless and because of that she can literally do nothing in life, no job, no interests, nothing. Because she is perfect and that means she will have be basically a prostitute. I... not gonna lie, I physically facepalmed at this. Of course Kvothe has to point out that she is a bigger victim than him.
It gets even worse. She pushes him around, disappears when she feels like, just generally acts like a bitch. Of course to his face she is all “Ohhhh, you are wonderful and special”, but her deeds say the exact opposite. Then this idiot, when he sees her with other men just thinks “okay, you bang her, but I make her laugh, okay, I am better”. A bruh moment.

Something about this book makes me feel like every single character deserves what comes for them, because they are either pretty one note background people, or the self-sabotaging duo of Kvothe and Denna.
Some of the smaller ones are fun, though. Kvothe has this absolutely mental teacher, Elodin. He makes no sense and just wanders around being visibly crazy in a fun way. I like him. Or his other teacher, Kilvin, who is basically the Hagrid of this book. They are not particularly deep so far, but they are nice.

The thing about writing exceptional characters is that you need to be at least as smart as they are to sell it. You have to be at least as charming or sell it. There is nothing wrong with them lacking something, but if you go overpowered, then sell it to me.
Here it just didn't happen. Many of the conversations between Denna and Kvothe were useless, as their relationship didn't develop and it wasn't nearly as clever or entertaining as it was intended to be. The handful of good jokes in this giant book didn't make it worth the endless amounts of eye-rolling “witty” content.

Sometimes fantasy authors get this urge to include poems and songs in books. I blame Tolkien. I respect him and understand his cultural significance, but damn, do we have so many authors who are convinced they will also write poetry. And again, in this case as well as in others, the poems weren't great. To me they just break up the pace, they are kind of uncomfortable and jarring after me going through hundreds of pages of prose.
Not gonna lie, I am not a huge fan of poetry and especially not of poetry from not-poets. There is a reason why some people pick different forms to express themselves. To me it's like if an author suddenly decided to paint their own book covers. Maybe some could. But mostly it will just feel amateurish, especially in contrast with the “main attraction”. Of course less effort will go into it and less expertise.

Maybe I will get angry comments about this, but I don't really care. Ones that call me names or claim I am stupid for not liking this or that I shouldn't have an opinion (because it's not nice or because I'm not an author myself, etc.) will be deleted, I don't have time for that.