The Name Of The Wind (2007)

By Patrick Rothfuss

704pp, Fiction

Notes

2026-02-24

Picked this up at Oxfam. I would normally avoid fantasy series where the author appears to have stalled on the final book but this was good. I don't feel that once I've read the second book I'm going to be annoyed that I can't find out what happens in the end (for a while at least), my enjoyment here was very much in the telling and.the journey. Whilst it's ostensibly (the first part of) a bildungsroman it's slow enough moving that you don't really notice the bildung much. It reminded me quite a bit of the Great Brain books i read as a child, a string of picaresque adventures strung together. The protagonist Kvothe *, attending wizard university, uses his great brain to get one over on someone, or to solve a problem, or get what he wants, but the outcome always exacts a coat which springs him back to where he started (generaly in debt, and in the bad books of his superiors).

* Kvothe? really?