Wise Man's Fear

Although some would disagree, book people will tell you that sometimes it’s nice to read a book again. Reasons to re-read are numerous, and often overlapping – to indulge in the pleasure of a familiar, beloved experience, like comfort food; to obtain a new perspective on a book you read years ago; to review the material for an academic reason; to refresh your memory on the plot and characters because a new installment of a series has been published.

Re-reading a book is one thing; re-using a column is, perhaps, another. Nevertheless, I hope you will forgive me for re-visiting a book review I wrote in July 2008. This, then, is a piece of that review:

Sometimes, the superlatives aren’t enough. … I have been accused of tending towards hyberbole. I have a hard time holding myself back, though: I say “H-U-G-E!”, drawing out the letters for emphasis; I say “awesome” and “amazing” quite a bit; I also like “fantastic” and “fabulous”. As a person who loves life and feels things deeply, it’s not unusual that my descriptions would be on the dramatic end of the spectrum.

This presents a bit of a problem, on occasion, when reviewing books. I love books. It’s easy to give all kinds of books an enthusiastic thumbs-up, employing any one of my favorite words noted above. But then what to do when a truly special book comes along? How to explain that this book, this author, the writing here, set themselves apart from anything else you’ve read in a long time?

Well, is that enough build-up, or have I exceeded my exaggeration threshold once again? If you can’t hear me on this, then look at what authors Ursula LeGuin, Terry Brooks, Anne McCaffrey, and Orson Scott Card – to name just a few – have to say about Patrick Rothfuss’s debut novel, The Name of the Wind. In just the short time since the first printing in hardcover in April 2007, Rothfuss has garnered praise from major newspapers all across the U.S. and Europe, as well as earning multiple-starred reviews in The New York Times, the Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and The Onion A.V. Club. Reviewers didn’t just intimate that Rothfuss was the next J.K. Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkien, they crowed it from the rooftops.

Just as I reassured readers in that past review, so I must emphasize again that, even if you don’t normally read a lot of ‘epic fantasy’, you may very well “still enjoy The Name of the Wind and the books to follow in ‘The Kingkiller Chronicles.’ Rothfuss’s writing is so mature, so capable, so smooth, that it transcends genre. In the same way that Tolkien wrote his Middle Earth books inspired by the legends of Classic Literature that he taught, so too, Rothfuss’s story reads like a modern telling of the heroes of old, the story of a man who became a legend in his own time. Rothfuss’s protagonist Kvothe reminds me of a Ulysses or Achilles, or more recently of Tolkien’s Aragorn. His story is by turns sentimental and sweet, intriguing, sad and desperate, triumphant, exciting, frightening. Both plot and the telling kept me turning pages well into the night.”

At the end of my review that July, over two years ago, I encouraged readers to sink their teeth into a wonderful new book, the start of an exciting, satisfying new trilogy. My last sentence was a blasé little warning: “The only problem… [is] waiting for Rothfuss’s second installment, The Wise Man’s Fear,” which at that time was due out the following April of 2009, less than a year from my first read of The Name of the Wind and my subsequent review.

The next time I enjoy the first book by a new author as much as that, I’ll remember to bite my tongue. April of 2009 arrived, and no book from Rothfuss. Also, no news, no word from him or his publisher, nothing from the distributors. Finally, after two or three months of wondering what on earth happened, news showed up on Rothfuss’s blog. He admitted to his fans that the pressure had been incredible: for years, he was simply a creative writing professor at a small university in Wisconsin; then, suddenly, he was internationally known. True hardcover first editions of The Name of the Wind are now selling for thousands of dollars. Rothfuss and his wife were expecting their first child. Bookstores, fans, his publisher and his agent were demanding that he go on a wide book tour. The re-writes of his second book had slowed to a crawl. Rothfuss asked his fans for forgiveness and patience. The part of that appeal that won me over was how Rothfuss explained that, as a reader, he truly understood how it feels to wait on the next installment in a series you love, but that as a writer, he was not going to release this second book until it met his expectations for himself.

After another missed release date in the early summer of 2010, we are finally at the gate for the real release of The Wise Man’s Fear, on March 1, 2011. Now, of course, I will have to go back to re-read the first story of Kvothe, to see how he got to the point where the second book opens in March. Was it worth the wait? Join the legions of Rothfuss fans to find out.

Hobo assures you that it will also be worth the wait for his second book. Want to re-read other book reviews in the meantime? Check out our blog at http://frommyshelf.blogspot.com