Guy Gavriel Kay

[pat5150]

I'll be posting this on the blog later today:

Jack Whyte will be in Montreal, Canada on November 18th at 10:00am, while Guy Gavriel Kay will be here on the 25th.

The event is called Books and Breakfast, and it's organized by Paragraphe Bookshop. Tickets are about 30$, but the authors will only sign books bought at the bookshop or on the premise. For more info, you can call (514) 845-5811.

Cheers,

Patrick

[Bellis]

Pat, isn't GGK from Montreal? So something I've been wondering since my teens, does he pronounce his name in French or English? I never know how to say it.

Well, to add my 2 cents: GGK was my favorite author for a long time. I discovered him at a time when I was reading poorer quality rip-offs of Tolkein, such as Brooks. Therefore, I have a soft spot for The Fionavar Tapestry . It's very flawed, a lot of it doesn't work very well (especially the Arthurian elements), but enough does work. AS high fantasy goes, it's perfectly respectable. Like later works by GGK, the characters are incredibly charismatic.

My favorite was Tigana, though I haven't re-read it in a few years. I suspect I might not be as enamored, particularly since my politics vis-a-vis nationalistic struggles has changed quite a bit since I was younger. From what I remember, it was the strongest work of his though.

Arbonne, Lions and Sarantium maintain a uniform level of quality, and you really can't go wrong with any of them.

I didn't much care for Last Light of the Sun, I found it slight in terms of plot, theme and character development, at least in comparison to his other works.

I also didn't think Ysabel was special, as young adult urban fantasy goes. His prose felt awkward when transported to modern day, and the character development was weak.

[Aryeztur]

A lot of people seem to hold him in high regard...Kay. I just finished reading one of his books, Al-Rassan. Now, people made me expect like a petite GRRM or something. While there were some similarities in the books, and I'd say perhaps Kay is proto-GRRM in some ways, he's really average, and I don't know why many GRRMers recomended him to me.

[Errant Bard]

Because they disagree with you, that's why. I really liked The Lions of Al-Rassan.

Could you give more details as to why you find him average? And what does proto-GRRM mean, exactly?

[Myshkin]

Yeah, I don't really get all the Kay love either. I read Tigana and found it mediocre, and I haven't had the urge to pick up any of his other works.

Edited November 26, 2007 by Myshkin

[The Marquis de Leech]

Yeah, I don't really get all the Kay love either. I read Tigana and found it mediocre, and I haven't had the urge to pick up any of his other works.

Replace "Tigana" with "The Fionavar Tapestry" and you get my feelings exactly.

[Astra]

I do like Kay.

So far, I have read:

Tigana

A Song for Arbonne

The Last Light of the Sun

The Lions of Al-Rassan

I really liked Tigana and The Last Light of the Sun. I believe one of the best fantasy I have read.

A Song for Arbonne - I found to be mediocre. A whole story was good but the ending was realy of ..meh..

The Lions of Al-Rassan - I liked and didn't like it. There were a few drawbacks that force me to say I didn't like it more than I liked it.

1. The beginning was very good. However, sometime starting from 1/3 or maybe 1/2? of the book there are huge time gaps when we have no idea what was happing to characters. We just have a very brief summary or hints on what happened. It is like a story should be 3 volums series, instead it was made 1 volume book with a few concise summaries in the middle of the book. It was very annyoing.

2. Politics. I hated this part. I hated that one bloody moron who is responsible for thounds of deaths that could be avoided staid alive and enjoyed a happy married life while another brave man died leaving his family without a husband and father. I wonder how much of it was just plain stupid PC, so the book would not make a certain group of people belonging to a certain bloody religion angry.

I believe the last 50 pages spoiled overall impression of the book for me completely.

Edited November 26, 2007 by astra_lestat

[Calibandar]

Come on, we just had a Kay thread last week:

http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?showt...&hl=gavriel

Maybe the mods can integrate these threads?

Also to the OP, please use the search function. Here is yet another Kay thread we had recently:

http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?showt...&hl=gavriel

[Astra]

Come on, we just had a Kay thread last week:

http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?showt...&hl=gavriel

Maybe the mods can integrate these threads?

Yeah, it would be nice. I would like to delete my post over there and retain my post from this topic. Cannot delete my post though, there is no such option on this forum

Edited November 26, 2007 by astra_lestat

[A Time for Wolves]

Reading all of this, it seems I should have started with Tigana. I tried to read The Summer Tree (first of the Fionavar Tapestry) and couldn't make it past the beginning. Maybe it was my mood or mindset at the time, but it was too dull and I did smell Tolkien in it, though not necessarily in a bad way.

I kept meaning to give The Summer Tree another try when I'm in a better mood for it, but I think I'll ditch that trilogy altogether and start afresh with Tigana one day.

[Crannogman]

I recently re-read Lions. I first read it years ago and didn't like it that much. Then I read most of Kay's other work and thought it mostly brilliant... except Song for Arbonne which I thought was average when I first read it but found to be excellent on a re-read.

So I tried Lions again. But unfortunately, here my opinion has not changed. In Lions, much more than in any other of his books, Kay is manipulating the reader. Not once but several times entire sequences are constructed so as to artificially play with the reader's emotions by holding back information the characters themselves do have. Also, here the excellence and wonderfulness of the characters that is just kep within believable bounds in the other books is over the top, no longer believable to me.

[Ran]

holding back information the characters themselves do have

This merely emphasizes the distinction between reader and character -- they are not the same thing, and there is nothing that requires that the reader know everything that the character knows.

To borrow from a certain fantasy series, Ned Stark very well knows who Jon's mother is, but we don't know, despite having been in his head during times when he must have explicitly thought on it. This is also an example of authorial manipulation. However, it seems that readers are more forgiving -- even desirous -- of having plot knowledge hidden from them, but if the author manipulates the knowledge they provide to readers for reasons of greater emotional fidelity to the narrative this is much likelier to be a problem.

It is a very interesting thing, to say the least.

[Errant Bard]

It's an issue about style, in the end. I don't necessarily prefer impartial documentaries over biased well told tales. Even if I am manipulated to think the wolf is the bad guy, I still like(d) listening to the story.

As for other comparisons with the aforementioned Fantasy serie, we had such things as non-plot related information shortage, like "She screamed a word" or "The axe took her in the head".

[salinea]

I think the problem is when overused it creates the feeling of a cheap effect. It's too obvious. The reader loves being manipulated, but doesn't want to be aware of how they're being manipulated.

I'd agree Kay overuses it in Lions (although I still loved that novel). I think some people would say that GRRM abuse it as well (mostly in order to create cliffhanger) even if he gets away with it because of the other qualities of his work.

[Guest]

Come on, we just had a Kay thread last week:

http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?showt...&hl=gavriel

Maybe the mods can integrate these threads?

Also to the OP, please use the search function. Here is yet another Kay thread we had recently:

http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?showt...&hl=gavriel

I must not get the search function. It seems I've started a number of redundant threads and I have tried to search. Is not similar to doing a search on google?

Anyhow, now that we're here, I'm in the middle of Al-Rassan and I am enjoying it. At this point, I could definitely see myself giving Kay another shot. It seems like there's a wide-ranging group of opinions on what his best books are.

Also, I've heard some people accuse him of being chick-lit. I don't know if I'd say so, but he certainly is compared to say, Scott Bakker. Lots of strong female characters and it almost feels like you're supposed to be swept off your feet or something by ibn Kairan, so that is a little chick-lit to me.

[salinea]

Also, I've heard some people accuse him of being chick-lit. I don't know if I'd say so, but he certainly is compared to say, Scott Bakker. Lots of strong female characters and it almost feels like you're supposed to be swept off your feet or something by ibn Kairan, so that is a little chick-lit to me.

I think I'm the only person who called his writing "chick lit". It wasn't an accusation - I wasn't using it to demean his work - but I was using it in an ironic way to make fun of the people who have missuse the name of "chick lit" to describe other novels (and in their mouth at the time, it was definitly an accusation), which I feel have some things in common with Kay's writing (It all started with a thread about Ellen Kushner's Priviledge of the Sword, but I think other female writers have a similar aesthetism to Kay's writing : Jaqueline Carey or Judith Tarr for example).

By the way, none of those books are "chick lit" in the true sense of the word, although they do seem to have some strong elements of romance (as you comment about Lions ^^) and seem to be more popular among female reader.

[Errant Bard]

By the way, none of those books are "chick lit" in the true sense of the word, although they do seem to have some strong elements of romance (as you comment about Lions ^^) and seem to be more popular among female reader.

There is romance and romance, in my mind. I found Lions romance minor, flavouring, not the plot point around which everything revolves like in a Kushner. The main theme for me was the passage of time, the ephemeral nature of existence, and the way history is written. The only thing that bothered me was the strong nationalist elements that somehow detracted from the impermanence theme.

That chapter when we don't know who is who was really superb, though. Maybe too obvious an attempt at tugging the reader's string, but I liked it nonetheless, only the aftermath bothered me.

SPOILER: lions

Both should have died, the ending was too sappy. I guess I never bought the eternal love thing, and would have been happy with a more awesome conclusion to it. As it was, it felt lame.

[salinea]

There is romance and romance, in my mind.

I totally agree. I don't think Lions or Priviledge are romance. But they both have strong elements of romance. (Almost every fantasy novels have some elements of romance, hence my formulation ^^)

I found Lions romance minor, flavouring, not the plot point around which everything revolves like in a Kushner.

I don't think Priviledge of Sword revolves any more around the romance points than Lions do. Swordspoint may set romance as more central, but even there, I wouldn't call it a romance novel. There are other driving points, the picture of a social milieu (comedy of manner), the various intrigues, all of Michael's subplot, the elements of swashbuckling, etc.

The main theme for me was the passage of time, the ephemeral nature of existence, and the way history is written.

Theme is not the same thing as plot, nor as tone. I think you can address a lot of different themes through a lot of different genres, so I'm not sure how relevant it is.

The only thing that bothered me was the strong nationalist elements that somehow detracted from the impermanence theme.

That didn't disturb me. Also, I wouldn't have called it "nationalist" (it's a bit avant la lettre for that). But attachment to cultural identities (with religion playing a big role to those cultures) is a natural thing to treat given the subject. I didn't feel like Kay was trying to make a point about how attached we had to be to nationalist ideas so much as aknowledge the strong role that those cultural identities play in people's life, in their histories (with smallcap and bigcap H), in their motivation, and in their art...

Of course I have personnal ties to all three identities (Jewish, Arab, and Western), so that whole theme had a lot of resonnance to me.

That chapter when we don't know who is who was really superb, though. Maybe too obvious an attempt at tugging the reader's string, but I liked it nonetheless, only the aftermath bothered me.

I liked it, but I would have liked it so much more if I had been feeling Kay was playing with me.

I didn't like the epilogue much either, so i guess I'm with you on your spoiler point too, although maybe I wouldn't go as far as you

[Crannogman]

Ran:

Fair enough, manipulation is often needed to keep the plot exiting.

But stranger's right too... the issue here is that Kay is so... obvious about it.

Paraphrasing:

"She walked down the street, saw the dead body and cried."

Then three different scenes setting up all kinds of characters who could possibly be dead.

That feels... cheap. I do not see any emotional fidelety to the narrative here.

Ned just not thinking about Jon's parentage doesn't, because it's more subtle.

On the other hand, having Ammar realise an assassination plot is afoot and then switching to the prospective victim knowing as reader the assassination is coming but having to guess at the outcome and seeing the events unfold helplessly... that too is manipulation of the readers' emotions, but a fair one I think.

[Lany Freelove Cassandra]

I just finished Ysabel. I didn't realize it was meant to be young adult and that explains alot. I can forgive most of the faults in it when taking into account the target audiance (weak character development topping the list)