I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Like, there should be a GIF of Will Ferrell as Mugatu making that face with his big hair right here in this review, only I’m too upset to actually find and put it here. And I feel like the ridiculousness of that image would sort of undercut how, I don’t know . . . upset? I was while reading this book.
I even read all of Pat’s warnings: on his website, in the forward to the book, on his Goodreads review of this book. I read all my friends reviews, that each talked about how this story isn’t going to be for everyone, it doesn’t do what most stories are supposed to. And I read the two reviews Pat linked to on his blog last week, the first of which is actually quite an amazing review, entitled “This Pretzel is the Worst Lasagna Ever”. The second was pretty great, too, sort of satirizing all the insubstantial one-star reviews the book had gotten so far.
And I thought to myself: whatevs. I’m totally going to love this. Rothfuss and I, we are on the same wavelength about fiction. It’s about Auri. I love Auri. It’s apparently pretty weird. I fucking love weird. There’s no way I’m not going to dig the shit out it.
Uh . . . I didn’t dig it.
I didn’t even just think it was okay, or have a ‘meh’ reaction to it.
While I was reading it, it made me angry.
I’m going to try and puzzle out my reaction in this review so that it can make sense, both for me and for anyone reading this, because this reaction was SO unexpected for me. But I want to get a few things out in the air first:
The book was absurdly well-written. My problem with it was not Pat’s craft. The guy is a meticulous, obsessive reviser. His writing always reflects that. And the choices he made stylistically were not wrong by any means, they just grated on me, personally (for instance his/Auri’s word choice can get a bit eclectic . . . most people will need to look at least a couple words up, that’s how out of use they normally are).
I do not care that the book is weird. This part of it I actively embrace, even if I didn’t enjoy the specific results. I like when stories ignore traditional story structures. It didn’t matter to me that the story had no identifiable arc, rise in tension or climax. It didn’t bother me that there is no dialogue, or that there is essentially only one character present. It didn’t bother me that it was basically a week in the life of Auri. It was a character study. I get that.
My problem is that I did not enjoy being in Auri’s head. This is the part I’m having trouble pinning down. As noted above, I actively disliked it. It made my blood pressure skyrocket, to the point where I had to keep putting the book down. Reading about Auri’s life and her thought processes made me angry.
Bear with me here as I try to sort out why.
First, it’s been about three years since I’ve read NOTW and WMF, but I remember liking Auri a whole bunch. I remember being touched by Kvothe’s interactions with her, him bringing her food, re-naming her, realizing something horrible had happened to her in the past. I remember feeling sad that a person like this could exist, someone so lost and out of touch with the world, they could barely take care of themselves. Someone fragile, but also resilient. From Kvothe’s perspective, and from mine, she came across as someone broken, yes, but someone also in touch with things normal people weren’t. It worked for me.
But actually being in her head was a different story. I’m sure a lot of people will interpret her actions as being poetic or beautiful or sad, the actions of a lonely person who is different trying to remake her own world so that it makes sense. And really, they wouldn’t be wrong. Auri doesn’t have people, she has silent objects that speak to her, I don’t know, poetically? Mystically? She spends all her days in the Underthing, rearranging her world, tending it. Finding the right home for all her silent objects. Acting like doing all the stuff she does is important. BUT IT’S NOT. NONE OF IT IS IMPORTANT. And her insistence on maintaining the illusion of her imaginary world has REAL LIFE CONSEQUENCES FOR HER. It is frightening and frustrating and maddening.
I’ll give you an example. She has a blanket, a blanket that she made by hand, and because the blanket has communicated to her that it never wants to touch the floor, as long as it doesn’t touch the floor, it will remain “perfect.” It’s her only blanket. I’m not even positive her bed has cushions, so it’s literally her only comfort and source of warmth at night. And then near the end of the book, the blanket accidentally falls to the floor, and suddenly it’s not “perfect” anymore. What does Auri do? She gets mad at it. She stops using it. She folds it up angrily in one of her special storage places and sleeps on a hard bed with no blanket. FOR NO REASON AT ALL. This is just so . . . futile. She is denying herself warmth and comfort in order to maintain the rules of her made-up world.
Her whole life is like that.
I know I must sound like an asshole typing this, especially since it’s very clear (and it was clear to me while reading) that Auri is mentally ill. I don’t believe there is a specific diagnosis, because it might have a magical source as well as a psychological one, but at the very least she has some sort of PTSD mixed with a sort of magical Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and probably depression is mixed up in there as well. There’s even a small sentence thrown in near the end that implies she was assualted (not sure if sexually) at some point in the near past. So there’s a reason she’s like this. She has retreated from the world. She makes up rules for that world in order to stay as sane as possible, and when something in her world goes out of line, she loses her shit.
The only part of the book that I really liked (and related to) came near the middle, when she has discovered that her stash of handmade soap has been eaten by a rat or something, and we get this narration concerning the thing that ate her soap:
“She stamped her foot. She hoped the greedy thing shit for a week. She hoped it shit its awful self inside out and backward, then fell into a crack and lost it’s name and died alone and hollow-empty in the angry dark.”
Oh, God, that’s good writing. I wish there had been more of that fire on display in her head. If there was, I would have loved this book. As it is, it’s mostly this:
“She tried to slide it back to proper true, but couldn’t see the shape of it and couldn’t tell the way of things and if it was a place where it was right.”
“She’d strayed from the true way of things. First you set yourself to rights. And then your house. And then your corner of the sky. And after that… Well, then she didn’t rightly know what happened next. But she hoped that after that the world would start to run itself a bit, like a gear-watch proper fit and kissed wit oil. That was what she hoped would happen.”
“She felt the panic rising in her then. She knew. She knew how quickly things could break. You did the things you could. You tended to the world for the world’s sake. You hoped you would be safe. But still she knew. It could come crashing down and there was nothing you could do. And yes, she knew she wasn’t right. She knew her everything was canted wrong. She knew her head was all unkilter. She knew she wasn’t true inside. She knew.”
Everything with her is a thing, so insubstantial and she expends so much energy on her delusions, only to be alone and hungry and cold when they crumble around her. Making friends with things that don’t actually exist is not making friends. And there are bed sheets up in this place she’s found, but she refuses to take them for herself, even though nobody else is using them, and she needs them . . . and I just couldn’t take it. I kept thinking, this girl’s life is horrible, and she’s chosen it (largely) to be that way. Why has no one stepped in to take care of her. We know at least a couple of people know she’s living under the university . . . why hasn’t someone tried to help her? Like REALLY help her? It’s one thing to be unique. It’s quite another to have your life depend on the smallest most insignificant things, and when one thing goes wrong, your life goes wrong. And she is alone, and her world is small. And she finds joy in the small things because she has nothing else to find joy in. And she doesn’t know consciously what’s she doing. She’s smart and capable, and she’s shutting herself away in a world, wasting her energy on things that don’t matter.
I know that’s the point. I know that’s the whole point. I know it. I just hated it. It made me angry without my permission. I would have preferred not to be angry, I really would have. Maybe that makes me an asshole, for feeling anger at this girl and the way she lives her life, instead of sympathy, but I try to be honest in this space, and saying anything else wouldn’t be honest.
I know I haven’t completely untangled my reaction to this book. It’s probably hit a nerve somewhere in my personal experience, and I’m just not realizing what it is. I hope any of you reading this have the opposite reaction to mine. I hope if you don’t like the book, you at least have the luxury of feeling ‘meh’ about it. I also hope that maybe with some distance I can come to feel differently about the book, but for now, this is what I’ve got. For now, though, I’m rating it three stars, because it’s one of those cases where it’s not the book, it’s me. And you don’t just one-star a book for that. At least, I don’t. One-stars are a class all their own.
So, thoughts, friends? I would greatly appreciate conversation/debate on this one. I hope you’re all having lovely days 🙂
P.S. The illustrations by Nate Taylor really are gorgeous.