One of the side effects of what happened is that I haven’t been able to read. I stare at a page and nothing happens, which is a great hardship for me. So I decided to read something completely unfamiliar to see if it brings me back into the reading mode. I promised people a long time ago I would venture into the fantasy genre, and now it made sense to engage in some good, solid escapism.
Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind did serve its purpose in that it got me back into reading. It is entertaining, it reads easily, and it also confirmed my suspicion that fantasy is the genre for lazy authors. Writing fantasy liberates them from the need to do any research and, supposedly, offers an opportunity to write with complete freedom about anything they want, creating alternative universes and fashioning them according to their own will.
Rothfuss’s alternative universe is, however, more secondary and unoriginal than any strictly realist work of fiction I can think of. The parts of the book that are not based on an uninspired retelling of Christian mythology (a virgin birth, a God who is the son and the father at the same time and who sacrifices himself to save humanity, quotes lifted directly from the Bible, etc.) are based on Judaic mythology (kabbalah).
Of course, the most important myth that informs the novel is that of the American Dream. The protagonist overcomes enormous hardship, pulls himself up by the bootstraps from horrifying poverty, puts himself through college and even manages to achieve the impossible and gets a scholarship to attend University (can you get any more American than this?), accomplishes incredible feats of strength and resilience, and is finally rewarded with the most wonderful thing existence can give an individual – his own business. Of course, it isn’t a very successful business. Not even epic heroes end up owning multi-national corporations these days. All that the world’s savior can hope to acquire as a result of his heroism is a dinky little bar with no customers. Still, it’s a bar, and how cool is it to be in charge of dispensing alcohol?
Another problem with the novel is that the construction of the plot is extremely haphazard. As I said, the author is lazy and doesn’t even try to make things conform to some sort of an internal logic of the novel. Sometimes he makes a half-hearted attempt to explain the contradictions that crop up in every chapter but soon tires of the effort. It’s as if Rothfuss took excerpts from books that made an impression on him, changed the names of the characters, and arranged these often incompatible bits and parts of other books in a random pattern.
Reading this novel was comforting in the sense that it offered absolutely no surprises. One knows exactly how each scene will develop. This defeats the escapist goals one might have, but it’s not a bad way to pass the time when you are incapable of doing much else. I know people love this genre and I don’t want to hurt anybody’s sensibilities. Originality is not Rothfuss’s forte but it might be there in other books belonging to the genre.
One regret I have is that I didn’t have access to such books when I was 11. I would have really enjoyed them then.
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