The Name of the Wind — Patrick Rothfuss

Patrick Rothfuss is an associate professor of English language and philology at the University of Wisconsin. In addition to being a writer, he published in the United States the epic fantasy novel The Name of the Wind, also called The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One, (The Name of the Wind — Chronicle of the Kings’ Killer), which was a best-seller in 2009.

For one of my birthdays, my brother gave me the first book, and I left it there forgotten because I saw it as another little novel of fantasy and dragons. While I was dealing with other things, I ended up deciding to read the book, as mentioned earlier, waiting for a story of heroic knights with magical powers fighting dragons or demonic monsters. Still, in the prologue, I came across this.

A triple silence

It was night again. At the Guiding Rock Inn there was silence, a triple silence.

The most apparent silence was a hollow, resonant calm, made up of the things that were missing. If the wind had been blowing, it would have sighed through the branches, would have made the sign of the inn creak on its hooks, and would have dragged the silence down the street as it drags the fallen leaves in autumn. If there had been people in the inn, even if only a handful of customers, they would have filled the silence with their talk and laughter, and with the din and clatter of a tavern late at night. If there had been music… but no, of course, there was no music. There were none of those things, and so the silence persisted.

At Guide Rock Inn a couple of men, huddled at one end of the bar, were drinking with quiet determination, avoiding serious discussions about disturbing news. Their presence added another silence, small and gloomy, to the other silence, hollow and larger. It was a kind of alloy, a counterpoint.

The third silence was not easy to recognize. If you spent an hour listening, you might begin to notice it on the wooden floor and in the rough, chipped barrels behind the bar. It was in the weight of the black stone fireplace, which retained the heat of a fire that had long since been extinguished. It was in the slow coming and going of a cloth of white thread that rubbed the grain of the bar. And it was in the hands of the man standing there, polishing a mahogany surface that was already glowing in the light of the lamp.

The man’s hair was as red as fire. His eyes were dark and distant, and he moved with the subtle certainty of those who know many things.

The Guide Rock Inn was his, and so was the third silence. So it must have been, for that was the largest of the three walls of silence, and it enveloped the other two. It was as deep and as wide as the end of autumn. It was as large and heavy as a great rock smoothed by the erosion of the waters of a river. It was a sound as patient and impassive as that of cut flowers; the silence of a man waiting for death.

Wait! I said to myself, a little surprised. Let’s see what this is about?

And I immersed myself in authentic literature, and the novel does indeed speak of spells, magic, demons, and mysteries. Still, it doesn’t do so by using these elements as a basis for the story, but rather the story is gradually unfolding, with minimal action, very little magic, but a lot of narration and good storytelling.

The first chapters reminded me of the adventures of Bean, one of the characters from “The Ender’s Game” in his novel, “The Shadow of Ender” tells the adventures of child survival of one of the main lieutenants of “Ender”.

But in our case, the main character, Kvothe, appears as a legendary being who, after years of retirement as a simple innkeeper in a dark and forgotten village, agrees to tell ascribe the real reasons why he became a legend, which he will do in three days, the first book takes place precisely during the first day of narration.

It begins with a terrible event that leaves him helpless and alone since he was a child. He’s just forced to survive through ingenuity, cunning, traps and the disinterested help of some people until another tragedy pushes him to go on and he manages to approach the university where the “arcanist”, a sort of magician-medical-warrior-wise man, are prepared; he meets great friends and great enemies.

The real action of the novel goes very slowly; everything goes in reflections, descriptions, and narrations of facts of intrigues, of ideas, all seasoned in such a way that it is impossible not to read it. It is not because of the thrilling action or the facts, as can be seen in the series of “Game of Thrones,” which is pure action from beginning to end.

“The Name of the Wind” is more reflective, more leisurely, more literary and of the right kind, I had years of not reading something with such pleasure, Patrick Rothfuss writes for the joy of writing, and that is why critics equate him with Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Ursula K. LeGuin, Jack Vance, some add Martin in this category, not me, Martin writes scripts for movies or series like the one that is generating so much money