Thoughts spilling out onto the screen
“Every story has an end, but in life every end is just a new beginning.” -Malcolm S. Forbes
A few days ago, I finished The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss. It was a good book. In the introduction, and after the book concludes, Mr. Rothfuss talks about how it’s not a “typical” book, and how, when he first wrote it, he thought no one would want to read it. It’s a tale about Auri, one of the characters in his Kingkiller Chronicles series. (Though, seriously, if you are interested in the novel, you should at least read a bit of The Name of the Wind-the 1st book in the Chronicles-first. Just to introduce you to the world, and the character, and then you’ll know who the “he” is that Auri keeps mentioning. But that’s just my opinion. You could still read the book and get plenty from it, even without that background, I bet.) She is the only person in the book at all, actually, unless you count references and pictures…
Auri lives alone, beneath the University in the city, and talks to the places and items around her as if they are people….friends… She does her best to do things the “proper” way and to put everything in its place, like a sort of balancing act for her world…or the entire world. The entire book feels like an exploration of her world and her life, giving the reader a glimpse of how things are in the Underthing. She finds happiness and joy in things most people wouldn’t spare a second glance at-an old brass gear missing one tooth, some dried and wrinkled peas… She notices the spirit and feel of things more, like how she says certain items and places are angry, or shy.
The above quotation makes me think of Auri, the main character of the book. Mr. Rothfuss says she’s “broken” and there are bits and pieces-little hints-about her past in the book, but she doesn’t act broken (at least, no more than anyone in the world of the books, or of the real world). She has had several endings in her life, I feel (but nothing has been directly stated) but that just means she has had several beginnings, too. Just like her gear, missing one tooth-it may be broken in the sense that it doesn’t work on its machine anymore and it has been forgotten by everyone but Auri, but it still serves a purpose, and it has a place it belongs (found by Auri). Or, if I can babble some more, it’s (and Auri) are rather like the Missing Piece in the kid’s book The Missing Piece (was that one by Silverstein? I can’t remember…) The Piece goes around, looking for the rest of himself that he went missing from, but eventually decides to become a whole unto himself-Auri is not broken, any more than the Piece was lost or the gear was out of place. She is who she is, and she knows who she is. Hopefully, in the upcoming book for the Kingkiller Chronicles, we’ll get to see a little more of who she is, too.
Well, that’s what I got from the first read, anyhow. I’m sure if I read it again in the future, with a different outlook, I’d end up with a new perspective. Sorry if that made no sense whatsoever. The bits and pieces I had bouncing in my head all morning for the post sounded good until I saw them on the screen, lol.
Oh, and I finally did some more work on my story last night! Well, indirect work on my story last night---I started another short story that predates my story’s events. It put a few more pieces into place about the backstory to my story, though.