Prologue: A Silence of Three Parts
In which Galatea spends over a thousand words berating Rothfuss for word-padding, and - as a ginger - calls another ginger "ginger".
It was night again."Again"? Why the tone of surprise, Rothfuss?
I know: this is a pretty small nit to pick this early in the book (particularly when you see some of the nits I'll be picking later), but it's just such an awkward first sentence. Is this a place where night doesn't typically happen more than once?
The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.Aaaand here we go. Spoiler alert: I've read ahead, and Rothfuss really loves this "silence of three parts" idea. So much that it bookends both of the novels that have already been published, and I'd lay money that it'll bookend the final volume too.
This knowledge of the future weighs heavy on my mind. Mostly because the "silence of three parts" takes about five words to become an extraordinarily tortured metaphor.
The first silence, we're told, is made by "things that [are] lacking", and that brings us to the first of our Kingkiller Chronicle counts:
NaNoPadMo: 1
These books are long. The first volume is over 200,000 words long, and the second volume is twice that. For a contemporary debut novel, that's fucking insane. Epic fantasy does tend to run longer than other genres because it's, well, epic. There's world-building to do, and the conflicts tend to be on a grand scale that calls for lengthy narrative and a lot of exposition woven - hopefully cleverly - into said narrative. The best epic fantasy novels do this in a way that makes the book seem much shorter than it is. The Name of the Wind is not one of those books.
It's really, really hard to shake the feeling sometimes that Rothfuss crams words into the book out of of a sense that more pages = more epic. I'm an inveterate NaNoWriMo-er, and I've used every trick in the book to pad my word count up to what I need to vomit onto the page in a day. So this count is to tally every time I recognise a technique I or NaNo-ers I know have come up with to get that word count where it needs to be so help me God, and spending 116 words lovingly describing shit that isn't there? Definitely counts.
Silence number 2 is the silence of two men stubbornly not talking to one another:
In doing this they added a small, sullen silence to the larger, hollow one. It made an alloy of sorts, a counterpoint.Welcome to the second count!
Face The Music: 1
Music is a big deal in these books, and Rothfuss handles it with all the grace and expertise of a six-year-old scratching out Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star on the violin for the first time. You could call this a music fail or a metallurgy fail, but either way an alloy and a counterpoint are not the same thing at all. An alloy (to wildly over-simplify) is a solution of one metal in another. They create something new and can't be separated, and it's impossible to tell without an extremely powerful microscope where one metal ends and the other begins. A musical counterpoint is two distinct melodic lines that, played together, complement each other and provide richness to the music. You can separate them, and each melodic line is valid on its own.
In short: either an "alloy" or a "counterpoint" is potentially a very valid metaphor for two sounds, silences, moods or whatevers coexisting in the same fictional space, but to describe them with both is a pretty fundamental contradiction. Which brings me to the next count:
Simile Soup: 1
Just as with length, epic fantasy gets a little slack on the purple prose front. The drama is heightened, the stakes are heightened, the environments are heightened; it's fair for the language to be a little heightened. This count is for any time Rothfuss goes beyond even the fairly forgiving standards I have for epic fantasy by swinging wildly for a metaphor or simile that just doesn't make sense.
The third silence was not an easy thing to notice. If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the wooden floor underfoot and in the rough, splintering barrels behind the bar.Why do I feel like the subtext here is "If you listened for an hour...but you probably won't"?
Aside from the vague feeling that Rothfuss is patronising me, the description of the third silence is actually quite lovely. It's atmospheric and rather minimal, and in the description of the cooling fire and the repetitive actions of the innkeeper it gives a real sense of the kind of weight that uncomfortable silences tend to have.
What? I can be nice!
The man had true-red hair, red as flame. His eyes were dark and distant, and he moved with the subtle certainty that comes from knowing many things.Oh.
It occurs to me that fantasy is almost as bad as anime when it comes to hair-colour-as-signifier-of-speshulness. Hair can't just be a colour: it must be a version of that colour so striking that it has to be described in terms that really don't make a lot of sense. What the hell is "true-red" hair? My hair's about as red as it gets before you head into unnatural shades, and I wouldn't call it "true-red", nor would I call it "red as flame". What shade of red is the inkeeper's hair "true" to?
You know what? I'm giving it one of these:
Simile Soup: 2
You know this guy is important because if he weren't Rothfuss would compare his hair to copper or carrots like the rest of us gingers do.
Home stretch: we're told that the inn belongs to flame-head, as does the third silence. This is appropriate, because the third silence is the greatest silence and contains all other silences. Rothfuss thereby implies that Kvothe - because come on, who hasn't guessed by now that Mr Head-on-fire is the protagonist - is great and contains multitudes. I may be tipping my hand a little regarding how I feel about this guy.
We get more description of this great, multitude-containing silence:
It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending.What?
Simile Soup: 3
It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone.Closer, but what?
Simile Soup: 4
It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.
Simile Soup: 5
I give up. See you in Chapter 1.
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