January 23, 2024
It will take every ounce of my self-control not to spend this whole review gushing. Patrick Rothfuss is my all time favorite author, and I rarely have anything but praise for his work. Reading him feels like coming home, and his style is so unbelievably easy. It never feels like work, only like you’re being tugged along by the wind. I discovered Rothfuss about the same time that I picked up Neil Gaiman for the first time, and as a result, I frequently think of them in parallel. In a span of months I was introduced to two of the greatest storytellers I’d ever read, and it completely reshaped (or maybe just helped to more clearly define) my personal value system with regard to books/stories/narrative/etc. The specificity that seems to drive these authors’ choices is astounding, and so very effective, both in terms of broad structural and narrative choices, and on as small a level as punctuation and word-choice. Every beat, every moment, feels so intentional. They (and for me, Rothfuss in particular) are perhaps the most deserving people of the title “wordsmith” as I have ever read. There's a reverence to Rothfuss’s language, deeply concerned with the very old power associated with words, and with names, both from the characters perspective and from the author’s. He taps into the concept of ancient rules and deals and oaths, and yet so much of his writing remains playful, even mischievous.
Rothfuss has a natural understanding of how to effectively write mysticism. Much of his writing involves transient, unknowable, extra-human characters and mythologies. As with his other novella, The Slow Regard of Silent Things, Rothfuss is able to dip further into the more ephemeral aspects of his world. The more compact medium allows him to leave his complicated and lore-heavy world-building behind for a moment, and dig into his characters and their singular experiences and perspectives. The characters understand aspects of the world that are simultaneously known and unknown to us. There are stakes that you don’t necessarily understand, but the full weight of which you feel intensely. There’s an innate, instinctive part of you that knows the danger and wildness of the world, a deep and ancient thing that knows to be afraid of the dark, that knows not to lie to the wind, that knows the worth of a promise kept. As a part of this, he plays the parallel nature of children and fae beautifully. Both with short attention but long memories, both ruled by their emotions but deceptively clever, both with a solemn and sacred understanding of making a deal.
Alas, I have failed, and all I have done here is rave and gush and lavish praise on this man. Perhaps one day Mr. Rothfuss will write something that doesn’t completely alter my brain chemistry and powerfully remind me how much I love stories. I wouldn’t count on it.
9/10
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