The Name of the Wind

Sometimes when I go to Big Smoke, I stop in a particular bookstore, because it is my type of bookstore.  It is dedicated to my kind of books, SciFi and Fantasy.  It is a big independent book store, which is to say that it is a fraction of a size to the large shotgun stores that have everything.  But, it has a SciFi and Fantasy section bigger than any four combined.  I am going to put the contact information right here, because I like the bookstore so much:

 Phoenix is located at 84 Harbord Street / Big Smoke, Ontario / M5S 1G5.

Phone:  416-963-9993    Fax: 416-963-9994

One of the things about a store like this that I really like is that the employees read the books.  And the owner and the staff write reviews and recommend books to people.  If you ask what it good, they will tell you, based on what you have read before and like.

One day I went in there and bout 10+ books, which is not an uncommon occurrence.  I asked them before I left about any recent finds that I had missed.  And they dropped in my lap a book that has made many of my friends hate me and love me.  Love me because, without exception, they all loved it, hated me because they had to wait for the second and now third book in the series.  Patrick Rothfuss, "The Name of the Wind."  

I put the book on my shelf and read my books.  I did not read this book first.  It had a dark cover and showed a rundown wooden building with a figure standing outside and then there was the title; it sounded like a romantic albeit classy Harlequin Romance Novel.  It was huge too, 800+ pages, thin paper, tiny print and it was his first novel.  The only promising things about the book was that it was highly recommended and that the bookstore employee told me that he had written the three books prior to sending the first one to the publisher, meaning it promised a short wait if it was good.

I picked it up and started reading it.

It is the story about an simple innkeeper and a world at war with a dark power. It is the story about a chronicler who got a tip that the innkeeper was actually someone else; the most famous and infamous, most talented person that had ever existed.  The chronicler wanted to get his story down on paper for the ages.  The hero consented only if he wrote the story as he told it exactly, without changing a letter, because he wanted to set the records right and he wanted no misinformation, rumour and mythologizing to colour his story as it did his life.  His second stipulation was that to tell his story it would take three days.  This to the chronicler was preposterous, that the biography of the greatest of kings, with all the great embellishments they added only took one day, why was he so special that he could not do likewise.  But three days he stated or no story would leave his lips.  

This is the most masterly telling of two tales, a tale within a tale that I have ever heard of.  He tells a tale of his youth how he survived the death of his family and lived on the streets of a bustling medieval city with only his wits and guile for survival and later his rise to the greatest university in the lands, earliest to ever be accepted and youngest to ever be expelled all before his teenage years.  Set in a backdrop of a sleepy dirt hamlet about to be thrust into dangers that would quake more sophisticated people and cause trained, battle weary soldiers to piss ice.  

For a first book, it is, there is no word to adequately describe it, but saying that it sets a new standard for excellence would be a start.

Every great Hero has a quest that is equal to his character.  The hero gained his motivation early in life and everything is leading up to something great and something terrible.  We know that he survived because he is telling the story, but whatever happened broke him too, that he is the innkeeper of a tiny smudge not on any map ever made, willing to be rolled over by whatever is coming, that most likely he had some hand in its cause.

How can a novel be so dark and filled with so much hope?  Read the book.  You will not regret it.  If you are a coward, wait a couple of years to wait for the third book, but read this book.

Oh one last thing, the title is NOT just a clever title.