An Opinionated look at:



Patrick Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear



By Eric Allen



One thing I can say for Patrick Rothfuss is that he has great ideas. Unfortunately, great ideas do not, by themselves, a great story make. I have heard rumors that the first book, The Name of the Wind, took eleven years of revisions and rewrites to finally get published. Whether that is true or not, his hard work paid off. Since its release, the internet hype over the future of the trilogy has been building to monumental pr

An Opinionated look at:Patrick Rothfuss' The Wise Man's FearBy Eric AllenOne thing I can say for Patrick Rothfuss is that he has great ideas. Unfortunately, great ideas do not, by themselves, a great story make. I have heard rumors that the first book, The Name of the Wind, took eleven years of revisions and rewrites to finally get published. Whether that is true or not, his hard work paid off. Since its release, the internet hype over the future of the trilogy has been building to monumental proportions. Rothfuss has developed an almost rabid, cultlike following of fans yearning to know what happens next. The Name of the Wind gave us many mysteries and few answers.The first book was a fun read that, while flawed in terms of story and character, was quite entertaining and extraordinarily well written. It was like the ramblings of an old man, talking simply to be listened to. Like cake, it tastes good but has little nutritional value in it. Make no mistake, I really enjoyed the first book, but as a followup to a great book, The Wise Man's Fear was insultingly bad.We were left with many burning questions at the end of The Name of the Wind. Would Kvothe learn to control the Wind? How would he be thrown out of the University? Would he ever become an Arcanist? Would he find some way to make money? Would he ever avenge his parents? How did he come from the promising youth seeking clues to the supernatural beings that murdered his family to the broken down innkeeper telling the story? Would he ever make any sort of progress with Denna, or would my book simply explode while I read it because of the pent up sexual tension?Were any of these questions answered or even addressed in this book? Not a one. So let’s take a look at The Wise Man’s Fear. Or, as I like to call it: The Name of the Wind 2: Kvothe Gets Laid.We begin where The Name of the Wind left off, with a much older Kvothe, now an innkeeper, telling the story of his life to the king's Chronicler. It is a story in three parts, told in three days, much like the silence that haunts his inn. At first I didn’t get the whole silence in three parts thing, but then I realized the writer was trying to be clever and failing miserably at it.As Kvothe begins his story, the book switches from third person to first person. He begins his next term of schooling at the University. Some of his teachers love him, others hate him. He’s made friends and enemies. Unfortunately, we’ve already read this before. It seems like the last half of The Name of the Wind has basically been retold here in the first half of The Wise Man's Fear.Luckily, the "plot" finally intervenes, and Kvothe takes a year off from his schooling for adventure, and hopefully to fill his pockets with a little money to fight off his abject poverty. An acquaintance conveniently knows of a rich and powerful nobleman in a distant land that is looking for a clever young musician to help him win the heart of the lady he has his eye on. Fortunately, Kvothe happens to be a clever young musician. Convenient...To make an extremely long story short, he foils an assassination plot, gains the nobleman’s trust, and helps him woo his Lady. In a completely pointless tangent he’s sent on a mission to bring bandits to justice, loses himself on a tangent from the tangent when he meets a seductress who teaches him how to please women. Then the tangent from the tangent takes another tangent to another distant land where he learns to tangent from a group of tangentary tangents, but is tangented by yet another tangent after leaving when he tangents upon some young tangents in need of being tangentially tangented away from--wait, what as I talking about again? Oh right, I'm reviewing a book. One could say that the entire last half of the book is just one gigantic tangent that has absolutely nothing to do with anything, and ultimately leads nowhere.Falling out with his lordly employer, Kvothe returns to school with an arrangement that for his services his education and expenses at school would be taken care of. At which point he resumes his school life as if nothing has happened and the book ends rather abruptly, again with no climax, no conflict, and no resolution.The good? Rothfuss has an excellent sense of humor. Kvothe can be entertaining at times, when he's not acting like an insufferable smartass... which is most of the time. The world and the magic system are very well thought out, and the different cultures and races seem very distinct and real. The writing itself is excellent. So good in fact, that most people don't even realize what a god-awful mess every other aspect of the book is. Despite all the bitching I do about this book, it was worth reading at least once for the humor, or to see the train wreck for yourself.The bad? Firstly, it is very evident that Rothfuss has ABSOLUTELY no respect for women whatsoever. Almost every woman in this book is a figurative, if not literal, whore that exists for the sole purpose of pleasuring, comforting, or otherwise confounding Kvothe. News flash Pat, women are people too. The same as you and me, with thoughts, feelings, and desires all of their own, that do NOT typically revolve around some incomprehensible and fantastical yearning to please men. Just thought you'd like to know.Half of this book is copy and paste from the first book. The other half has little to no point and goes absolutely nowhere. There’s no conflict, there’s no suspense, there’s nothing like a normal story arch. There is no climax because the book doesn’t build up to anything. Like I said, Patrick Rothfuss has great ideas, but no storytelling skills to apply them to. The whole narrative is incoherent and nonsensical. You have to reward your readers with a climactic event or two for sticking with you through the whole book, Pat.Far too much time is spent on characters telling allegorical stories that really have little point or purpose except to take up space in a book that is already FAR too long for what actually happens in it. They take up huge swaths of the book and leave the characters with very little in the way of worth afterward. The lessons they learn could have been simply taught through other means or much, much shorter stories. The huge amount of tangents that the story takes makes it feel as though the writer made it up as he went along. It's really so incoherent, and so rambling that I believe this book should have been marketed more as a collection of short stories than a novel. The frequent interruptions back to the present day where Kvothe discusses aspects of his story are annoying and hugely distracting, breaking up whatever little suspense that the writer managed to cultivate. Not a single question raised in the first book was answered, or even addressed in this book, in fact this book picks up as though there were no questions left by the first book and does nothing to either build up the mystery of them, or move closer to answering them. It is as though the writer completely forgot all of them and moved on to something else.If you’ve read The Name of the Wind you have no need to read The Wise Man’s fear, because you’ve already read it. It’s basically the same book, and there isn’t a single thing necessary to the overall story that happens in it. When book 3 eventually comes out, you could probably pick it up after reading book 1 and not have missed a single thing. This book was completely unnecessary, and utterly pointless.I have never liked the first person perspective very much. It gives a very narrow view of the world as you can only see, experience and feel the world through the eyes of a single character. You have no other views to give perspective. I always find the contrasting views of different characters to give the world and story a lot more flavor than simply following the words of a single character. However, some of my favorite books are written in first person. It can be done well, and for the most part Rothfuss does good things with it, but when he moves to the parts of the book that happen in the present day he switches to third person and the contrast is jarring and almost as distracting as the actual interruptions themselves. Especially because he does not seem to be as talented in writing third person as he is at writing first person.Rothfuss goes out of his way to shoehorn the title of the book into the story in several places and it's really distracting. It was like he came up with a great sounding title, and then completely drew a blank on why the book should be called that, then dropped a couple references in after the fact. He also seems to think his readers are idiots and frequently talks down to them.The ugly? Lots and lots of sex. There are so many sex scenes in this book that I started to wonder if it shouldn’t have had a shirtless, ripped, long-haired dude on the cover and a title more like Warrior of Passion, or some such nonsense from the porn—er, I mean Romance—section of the bookstore. Everywhere Kvothe goes, women are throwing themselves at him. I wonder what his secret is… Must be the Axe body spray. In real life, no man has women constantly trying to jump his bones simply because he's the main character in the story of his own life. Especially not sixteen year olds who are often thought to be younger than that by appearance. That's called pedophilia, and most people tend to see that as very WRONG. News flash, women don't typically think or act like that. If I were a girl reading this book I think I'd find myself highly offended by this. It's almost as though he's the bearer of the One Wang. Yes, the fabled One Wang of Power. The One Wang to rule them all. The One Wang to find them. The One Wang to bring them all, and in the darkness... well, you know.Denna.I.HAAAAATE!!!!!FREAKING.DENNA!!!Oh my holy hell, I hate this character. Talk about doing EVERYTHING you possibly could in character creation wrong. I get that the writer obviously wanted to make a mysterious female character for the male lead to fall for, someone who equals his own mysteriousness. And that sort of thing CAN be done well, but here, it's definitely NOT. You can only drag it out so far before it becomes annoying, distracting, and downright torturous. Rothfuss has completely and utterly failed in making a compelling love interest. Why do I hate her so much? Because, frankly, she's just a badly crafted and written character. She is bland. So much so that Rothfuss should be both highly embarrassed and ashamed of her. She is boring. She is annoying. She tries to be clever, but isn't... AT ALL. She is not a realistic portrayal of a woman in the slightest bit. She serves no purpose to the plot whatsoever and is blatantly shoehorned in where she does not belong because someone decided that every work of fiction just HAS to have a love story in it. Her faux mysteriousness is badly written, contrived BS that does little but annoy the reader and make her even more painful to sit through. And, most importantly, she adds NOTHING of value to the story even in the barest possible meaning of the term! In short, she is completely unlikable in any way, shape or form. Besides being completely unlikeable, neither she nor Kvothe act like they give two damns about each other, and their relationship fails completely because it's been dragged out FAR too long. Even the most rabid Twi-tard would likely agree on that point.Sometime in the story SOMETHING has to happen between them. You can't just keep building up between two people that honestly have no reason to fall in love with each other and call it a love story. DO SOMETHING!!! And for the record I do not count an argument that has absolutely nothing to do with their relationship in any way to be "something" happening in said relationship. Rothfuss keeps playing up her mysteriousness to such a degree that I finally just started flipping through and skimming the last few chapters with her in them because she pisses me off too much. I get it, she’s terribly mysterious, GET TO THE DAMN POINT ALREADY!!! She turns an otherwise entertaining character into a whining, crying, spineless, emo, stalker. Her character is so distracting and utterly painful to be subjected to that she completely ruins the book all on her own. If every other gripe I had about the book mysteriously disappeared, the presence of Denna alone would have ruined it. Worst of all, this painful mess of a love story, has yet to serve any purpose to the overall plot. Oh, it may come into play in the third and final book, but suffering through this horrible, boring, emotionless, and frankly unbelievable abomination for two books leading up to it is asking too much. There haven't even been any hints whatsoever that it may, in fact, be important later on to what passes for a plot in Patrick Rothfuss' universe. It’s a contrived, annoying, distracting, and frankly painful waste of time.Remove Denna from the series entirely and it is a much better series. I do not know who came up with the rule that in every work of fiction there must needs be a love story, but guess what. Sometimes, you really don't need one. It becomes superfluous and takes away from the story instead of adding to it. This series certainly would benefit a GREAT DEAL without one. Why? Because Rothfuss doesn't know the first thing about love, which is painfully obvious if you've read even one scene between Kvothe and Denna. He doesn't seem to understand what love is, or how it works. He seems to subscribe to the George Lucas version of love. Two talented and good looking people are together... TADAAAAAAH, IT'S LOVE!!! now shut up and enjoy your ridiculously over the top computer animated explosion fest of a climax. If you can't craft a believable and compelling love story. STOP. Take two steps back. And completely remove it from your book, because the story is better off without it than it is when it completely fails.A love story has to develop and always be moving. Whether it be forward or backward, it must always be going SOMEWHERE. The characters have to get to know each other and fall in love through mutual experiences and differences, not randomly meet here and there and have a boring conversation with a convenience that stretches credulity and coincidence alike. The supposed relationship between Kvothe and Denna goes exactly NOWHERE, and it leaves you wondering why the author keeps trying to tell us that there is even a so-called love story between these two characters at all in the first place. There has to be some sort of progress made. You can’t throw two good looking people together that have no reason to fall in love with each other and call it a love story. There is nothing about this love story that is a.) even a love story and b.) the slightest bit interesting.And yet Kvothe continuously pines after this girl as though he has any sort of meaningful relationship with her when there is no reason whatsoever for him to even care that she exists, other than that she's a girl and he's a boy. There may be some small, one-sided physical attraction on his part, but physical attraction does not equal love. The attraction is NOT mutual, however, and that is plainly obvious in the way that Denna acts and speaks to Kvothe. The lengths to which the author goes to assure us that there is a love story here are almost as creepy as the lengths to which Kvothe goes to stalk her. Especially because she has expressed no romantic interest in him at all and frequently attaches herself to other men IN HIS PRESENCE, INCLUDING his arch-nemesis Ambrose. AND THEN, Kvothe himself basically bones every girl he meets in the entire book OTHER THAN HER!!! What is this? This isn't a love story. It's like watching a rock try to get it on with a piece of wood. They constantly boink other people throughout the book, and seem to have no romantic feelings toward one another at all. Do you even understand what love is Pat? From this book I can definitely say that you do not. I haven't seen such a failure to write a compelling love story since Attack of the Clones. And I'm not just biased against love stories because I'm a guy. I will admit that I do enjoy the occasional, well done love story, so long as it actually serves a purpose to the plot, or makes me feel that these characters truly do love each other and deserve to be together--two things that are lacking here, so much so, in fact that it completely and utterly ruins the entire series from the first page Denna walked in on. The moment she showed up was the moment this series was irrevocably ruined. I can’t wait for her foreshadowed death because I will cheer with joy the day I read her last words. Until then, I award Patrick Rothfuss the George Lucas Totally Understands Love Stories Award.So, after all is said and done, is The Wise Man’s Fear really as bad as I make it out to be? YES!!! IT IS!!! But at the same time, no. It really isn’t that horrible. If you can ignore that this entire book is completely pointless and full of a non-love story that is really starting to grate, it can be quite entertaining. The sense of humor, and Kvothe as a character, are enough to keep you interested through the good and the bad alike. Denna is annoying and pointless, but you can skip any chapter about her and miss little to nothing because she's not important to the plot and serves no purpose at all except to make Kvothe so lovesick that he screws 25+ other girls during the course of the book. *shrug* Yeah, I don't get it either. If sex scenes offend you, you’ll be doing quite a bit of skipping. As I said before, this book was completely unnecessary, and did nothing at all to ultimately advance the plot, or the characters. If you come at it as a work of comedy rather than part of a grand epic fantasy, then you'll likely be entertained by the humor. On the other hand, you could pick up book 3 when it comes out and not be lost at all, because this book was about nothing. The characters did not learn, grow or progress at all, and it ends as it begins, with Kvothe in school, dealing with the same problems he was dealing with in the beginning. He hasn't taken anything away from his misadventures. He hasn't learned any lessons. He's the same character he was at the beginning. There’s a great story in here somewhere, the author keeps hinting at great events to come, but he never takes any steps closer to them. It’s the best book about absolutely nothing that you’ll ever read.At the risk of inviting nerd rage the likes of which GOD has never seen, I give The Wise Man’s Fear 1 star. It loses points in complete lack of plot, endless tangents, repeated use of pointless allegory, and inflicting Denna's completely horrible side story on us. The only thing that kept me reading this book was the sense of humor. Patrick Rothfuss seemed so promising after his debut novel, but I doubt his will be a lasting name unless his next book makes some major improvements upon the pile of steaming crap he served us with The Wise Man's Fear. He has obvious talent, but lacks any skill to apply it to. I have been accused of giving this book a poor rating simply because everyone else loved it. This is untrue. You can take my words at face value. I mean what I say. I say this book is terrible because I truly feel that it IS terrible. Not every book is for everyone, and this one is not for me. Just because a lot of people enjoyed it does not mean that I did. I've read a rare few books I disliked more than this one. Agree or not, that is my HONEST opinion. You don't have to agree with me, but I don't have to like this book. I have never read a book so vacuous, vapid, pretentious, and up its own ass as The Wise Man's Fear.