by Austen Jennings
The Slow Regard of Silent Things, Patrick Rothfuss’ latest novella, is a stray moon beam in an otherwise unlit cellar. Focusing on a mysterious character from the first two (full length) installments of the trilogy baptized The Kingkiller Chronicle, Slow Regard comes as a much appreciated lens, though not without a warning from it’s author.
As Rothfuss prefixes – ‘If you haven’t read my other books, you don’t want to start here.’ He’s referring to the aforementioned LP’s The Name of The Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear. Slow Regard concerns one of the ‘lesser’ characters named Auri. She, despite being lesser in page count, occupies a pivotal space for the hero of the tale, Kvothe. Like Mr. Rothfuss, I too will provide a caution before you read the rest of this. While it contains no spoilers, some of the references will ‘fall on deaf ears’ if not familiar with at least his first book. Don’t let this discourage you as it’s unimportant. What is important is that it may prompt you to read the books, which is the best decision you could make at this point in your life. So too much caution is ill advised.
I’m prone to saying I rarely reread books – at the expense of abusing this qualifier once again to (over)articulate my feelings for The Kingkiller Chroncicle, rarely do I read a book twice. Mid-way through Slow Regard I found myself desperately craving a second romp in the barn with Name of The Wind (I will refer to this book from here as Name or, simply as N). The first go around I had with Name was quick and passionate, ergo the romp. So I put down the novella and picked up N expecting to come back to the same sexy flash as before. But I found this vixen to be quite different from what I remembered. While still exhilarating, she had matured a great deal. I now found subtlety where before I had only experienced pace and the new. I found intricacies and complexity that were overlooked in my former hast. It was bliss, as before, but now aged and refined. This change is of course my own advancement as a reader. I was an enthusiastic E’lir; now, I’m sure Master Rothfuss would sponsor me to Re’lar.
Not ready to pick the novella back up, my lust unabated, or rather bewildered, I looked to Wise Man’s Fear (Wise or W) with a curious eye. And so, with my strange second encounter with Name, I wanted to see if the same would hold for Wise.
This was the case upon my initial reading of the series: N > W. In Wise I felt the Felurian bit was way too long, among other things, and that the story advanced in a slipshod fashion in places and not at all in others. I still loved W, but N was the one. Though, now after my second reading of the two, I’ve found the orientation of my desire to have been inverted. I found Felurian’s scene to have been the perfect length and the story never fell. So now: N < W. Not only have I found the second book to be better than the first, but I like the first book better than the first time I read the first book. In all ways it is better. Don’t let me confuse you. The books are spectacular. That’s all you need know. And if you haven’t read them, you must. Simple.
And with this I pick up The Slow Regard of Silent Things once more. I finish it and love it. It satiates aspects of the story that get (rightly) left out from the other books. It’s fresh, odd, and entirely different from anything he’s done yet. The remnants after distilling Rothfuss’s works is his prose. It’s beautiful and highly lyrical. His books feel like a tragic song, something Kvothe would be proud of.
The only books I’ve found myself doing a yearly with is Moby-Dick and Infinite Jest. The Kingkiller Chronicle is close to finding itself among them.
Written by Austen
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