Do you ever read something and just know it was written by a man? Particularly when dealing with the subject of women? Of course, I do know Patrick Rothfuss is male, but I mean, sometimes you just get this feeling of deep knowing in your soul… more on this later.
The Wise Man’s Fear is the second book in Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle series, and I feel like the book was really split in half for me in terms of enjoyment: literally, I liked the first half just as I enjoyed the first book in the series, but the second half fell flat and started dragging.
Maybe my enjoyment of the first half was because I enjoy Kvothe’s adventures at university and searching for answers to the Chandrian mystery so much, which the first half of the book once again focuses on as an older Kvothe continues to tell the story of his life. As the tale continues, however, Kvothe leaves university in search of patronage from a powerful maer, and then comes to be involved in some work ridding the roads of bandits, falling into step with a seductive fae woman, and even learning the combat practices of another culture who try to keep their arts secret to others. Of course, Kvothe continues his trail of adoration and unrequited love of Denna throughout the novel as well.
The part where things really start getting slow and I began to not enjoy it happened once Kvothe is asked by the Maer to leave on a task of ridding an area of bandits. This takes some time and is confusing as to whether or not there is a bigger intention to the task. The period of time later in the book where Kvothe is coming to learn the secret arts and combat of the Ademic people also seems to drag and Kvothe appears to have not nearly enough patience for, which makes me wonder if he doesn’t think a little too highly of himself at times (though he does learn things quite quickly as I think I mentioned in my review of the first book, The Name of the Wind. He’s a bit of a special snowflake).
The point where I really started to get annoyed with how things were dragging on, (almost seemingly uselessly) was before Kvothe joined the Adem, and when he meets Felurian, a fae woman who drives men mad through seduction. This whole section of the book appears at this time to be solely to tell how Kvothe came to obtain a cloak made of shadow, which is great, but it goes on for such a long time seemingly just as a bit of content to fill some guys’ spank banks. This is where we get into how I could tell it was written by a man. You know that article going around that’s like, “If Women Wrote Men the Way Men Write Women”? It’s exactly like that. I swear, Rothfuss couldn’t go a single page without mentioning how “lithe” Felurian’s body was, how it was pressed against Kvothe’s, how “languid” she was, etc etc etc. I rolled my eyes more than once. And this goes on for a while, just Kvothe having his sexual awakening, which then continues on to later parts of the book where he can’t help but mention the curve of women’s bodies and breasts underneath their clothes, and all that. And hey, I’m not saying I am not down for some sexual content but I really felt like this added nothing, and just made things stretch out too much and not in an interesting fashion.
In any case, as I mentioned earlier, the first half of this book was super solid, just like the one before it, but the second half left me wanting and a little bit bored, to be totally honest. I definitely want to see what comes next, as Kvothe continues to tell the story of his life and we see implications of this during the time of the telling. But I hope it doesn’t fall into the typical “trilogy trap” as so often happens where the first book is fantastic, the second is decent, and the third just makes everything fall apart. Hoping for the best, y’all!
Also this will definitely be my last CBR review for this year, so I hope everyone has had a good one, and I’ll see you all again in the new year!
The biggest complaint I’ve seen about this book is precisely the problem you had with it. And I’ll say that when I read it, I just wanted that part of the book to be over with. So I don’t at all disagree with this criticism.
But it didn’t soil the book for me like it did a lot of people (and maybe that says something about me). Looking back on it, I kind of shrugged it off as Kvothe being a somewhat unreliable narrative. Describing his sexual exploits to his audience reeks of braggadocio, to me.
“Okay, we get it. You spent an eternity in the company of a fae woman, learning how to be a god among men. You’re super talented at everything. Okay.” That’s how I see his audience responding to this part of the story.
But, yeah, Rothfuss really could’ve trimmed this section of the book and lost nothing in the narrative.
Yeah, I definitely still enjoyed it, just not as much as the first book! I found the whole parts with the bandits and the Adem and everything to just start dragging on, too. I feel like I was maybe getting a little tired of Kvothe and needed a break from him, haha
I literally had to get up and make a cup of tea and settle in for your review. Perfection! I just agree with everything. While I get that in fantasy the main character is a certain degree of “chosen one”, Kvothe is a little too over the top. And the worst part about the sexyness was that it wasn’t sexy per se, it wasn’t two people coming together in lust and passion it was a man listing off skills as if just having a sufficient amount of skills is enough to make sex great. And that is about the least sexy ever.
I’m still really excited about the third one. Have you read “the slow regard of silent things”?
I’m definitely going to read the third book. But no I haven’t read the Slow Regard of Silent Things! I don’t even entirely know what that is??
It’s a short story focusing on Auri and her life in the underworld. It’s okay, if you like books about autists/people dealing with trauma from their point of view. Though their is a quite a bit about her thinness and smallness that while kind of relevant to the story also feels a bit exploitative. But I really loved it. It was slow to start, but by the end I was all in. I did I review of it as well :)
For some reason this review just kicked off a rage spiral in me. It’s nothing I haven’t thought of or realized before, or that you haven’t read before, but it’s just like… ugh. Guys don’t understand this, even when they’re “woke” and know how to look for it. They just don’t get how all you want is to enjoy the book that you’re reading, without getting these subtle, sexist signals that you’re good for one thing. And if you take it book by book, you can sometimes kind of explain away or rationalize why that’s included in the book — it’s someone’s sexual awakening; the female character intentionally uses sex for her own power, she’s not being objectified! — but it all boils down to how male authors over and over again employ the male gaze, and every time I encounter it I feel slimier and slimier until words like “lithe” and “supple” lose all their meaning and feel more like slurs than neutral descriptors.
It’s no wonder I read mostly women.
SUPPLE!!! I cannot stand it anymore when an author uses that word!! It’s the worst one!
With the recognition that this may just be a product of your self-described “rage spiral”, I’m curious why you think it so impossible for men to understand this?
I don’t think empathy is too high a demand for you to place on men. Especially when it’s not even required, here. Sympathy, at the very least, should be within the male reach.
As a man, I’ve struggled reading women precisely because their depictions of men can ring false. I’ve most recently encountered this with various male tropes within the romance genre; tropes which I find not only irksome, but unrepresentative and unobtainable.
We all look at the world through our own lenses, and sometimes struggle to see the world from the perspectives of others. This isn’t just a male/female thing (nor is it a black/white thing, nor an American/other nationality thing, etc). We all live in bubbles, to use the buzzword of post-election America.
As I said in my comment above, when I read this book years ago, I just kind of rolled my eyes at the guilty section of this book. I found it trite, tiresome, and stretching the bounds of what’s possible even when disbelief has been suspended. Confronted with the criticisms and concerns of people like the above reviewer didn’t create in me a feeling of confusion or disbelief, though. They just encapsulated a feeling I got from the book, but didn’t quite articulate. And it’s something I’ve recognized in numerous other books – including Brent Weeks’ Night Angel trilogy (which I’m currently reading).
This isn’t a hard thing to recognize. Even for men.
I say all that knowing it’s a small part of your overall point, and that it must be particularly grating considering how much of our entertainment is filtered through the male perspective (ie, almost all of it), but I still don’t think it’s above the capability of men to display even a modicum of sympathy and/or empathy for your concern, here. And I’m not saying that as someone uniquely enlightened – because I’m far from it.
Hm, I know you’re coming from a good place, but I think you read a lot more into my comment than what was intended and you’re coming off a bit patronizing here. I believe there is a difference between recognition or empathy, and the actual gut punch I get as a woman when I’m blindsided by the casual misogyny that crops up in media I had been unreservedly enjoying up until the moment it rears its ugly head.
This, from your comment: “But it didn’t soil the book for me like it did a lot of people (and maybe that says something about me). Looking back on it, I kind of shrugged it off as Kvothe being a somewhat unreliable narrative. Describing his sexual exploits to his audience reeks of braggadocio, to me.”
It perhaps wouldn’t completely soil a book for me, either. But it’s more than a shrug, and I can’t just dismiss it on a book-by-book basis, chalking it up to each individual narrator being unreliable or chauvinistic. Because that gives authors an out by allowing them to blame their characters, instead of holding them accountable for contributing to a media landscape where women are so frequently portrayed this way. That’s what I mean when I say men don’t understand. You can recognize it, and you can grok that it sucks, but you don’t experience the visceral trivialization of your personhood when you encounter it.
Sorry that I sound patronizing. On my end, I don’t feel like I was patronizing you, and I’m not entirely sure why I came off that way.
My comment was a response almost exclusively to your above comment that “men don’t understand” that this kind of writing is sexist and offensive. I don’t think that’s true, and wonder why you write this failing off like it’s tattooed on the Y chromosome. If a man doesn’t understand this, I don’t see why we shouldn’t either encourage him to change or be ridiculed.
As to your last paragraph, I think this is the problem with blanket statements: they require you to make assumptions about individuals based on nothing more than the larger philosophy you are trying to keep intact.
I didn’t “dismiss” this section of the book. I was discomfitted by this section of the book, and explained it at the time as being the product of an unreliable narrator. After the fact, seeing other opinions (like Lisa Bees) gave me a new framework in which to picture it. I don’t currently think it’s just an unreliable narrator.
In the book I’m currently reading, something similar is going on. I don’t think it’s an “unreliable narrator”. I think it’s a product of the male gaze. I think it’s offensive.
This is how it works, right? As someone with an open mind, I consider the perspectives of others, and use them to inform my view of the world.
None of us viscerally experience everything. We have to rely on people with different contexts and life experiences to develop a broader, more comprehensive understanding of our world. When I read this part of the book, I didn’t like it. But my understanding of my feelings were a product of my context. As my context changed (thanks to the input of others), my articulation of that feeling changed.
That sounds like underatanding, to me. Maybe I’m wrong.
And perhaps I worded my thoughts poorly in my above response. I wasn’t planning on having a deeper discussion on the subject of innate sexism.
I’ll never know what it feels like, actually, to get kicked in the balls. But I know that it sucks! Likewise, you probably don’t know what it feels like, actually, to have experienced a lifetime of sexism. But you do know that it sucks.
And that’s enough! I’m very glad that there are plenty of men out there who empathize and fight against sexism.
I did not say or intend to insinuate that men are incapable of understanding sexism, as a concept. I also did not say that men are unable to recognize sexism when they encounter it. I was referring to the emotional response that is colored by my experience as being female, that involuntarily arises when I encounter sexist material in books and media I was otherwise enjoying.
I felt you were being patronizing because you seemed to think you needed to explain empathy and the potential goodness of men to me, when I wasn’t really dragging their potential for either. I was referring to that visceral reaction which, as you say, isn’t universal. If I was unclear, a request for clarification may have been sufficient.
I wasn’t trying to explain empathy to you, nor did I think I would need to do such a thing. I was attempting to clarify my belief that ignorance of offensive and near ubiquitous depictions of women in entertainment is not a justification for male ambivalence towards same. That wasn’t a claim you made, but it was a possible implication for the all-encompassing assertion that I took exception to.
This whole thing, I guess, boils down to my fundamental disagreement with this idea that our problems are uniquely our own, and that other people, who maybe haven’t been through them, can’t understand our struggles. I don’t think that’s true. I think that kind of thinking belies the entirety of human progress, compassion, and imagination, and misrepresents “understanding” as not existing until 100% coverage has been attained.
I mean, am I ever going to “understand” childbirth to the point that I can speak from experience? Of course not. Will I ever be able to, with authority, tell a young woman what to expect? Of course not. What I can do is understand the process of it. I can talk to women who have gone through it. I can be there while my wife goes through it. I can put myself as close to it as I can, and try my best to compare my own knowledge and experiences to it. Is there not a type of understanding there, at least? It’s not close to 100%, obviously, but it’s surely closer to that than it is to ambivalence and ignorance, right?
When you said “men can’t understand” what it’s like, what I hear is, “if you can’t reach 100%, there’s no point in trying, because it’s not good enough. You aren’t there.” I think that’s wrong. I disagree with that.
I think there are going to be gaps in our understand – there always will be, but I think the fundamental principle of reaching out and trying to put yourself in the place of another person brings with it a level of understanding that is perfectly valid.
And maybe you agree with that, I certainly don’t think you are trying to attack men (nor would I particularly care to intervene if that were the case), and maybe I’ve spent a lot of time and energy derailing this conversation for no reason.
Sometimes, I tilt at windmills.