Andrzej Sapkowski

The Witcher — (1990-2000 in Poland) (2008 in English) Andrzej Sapkowski wrote three story collections and five novels in The Witcher world. This is the first story collection published in English. Publisher: Geralt de Rivia is a witcher.A cunning sorcerer. A merciless assassin. And a cold-blooded killer. His sole purpose: to destroy the monsters that plague the world. But not everything monstrous-looking is evil and not everything fair is good ... and in every fairy tale there is a grain of truth.

The Last Wish

Lately I've been playing the computer game The Witcher, which is based on Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski's The Last Wish. My nice little enhanced edition came with an excerpt from The Last Wish. Though the book is translated from Polish and therefore at times a bit awkward, it has this quiet intensity that caught me off guard. Like having that quiet, clumsy geeky kid you knew in high school mosey up to you suddenly, grab you by the neck and fling you down the hallway. I was so intrigued by this feeling that I promptly went out and bought the actual book.

And I'm glad I did. I've never really experienced a book quite like The Last Wish. First of all, it's told in an almost anthology-like style. There are brief interludes which deal with the main character — Geralt of Rivia, the witcher in question — staying at a temple while he recovers from a neck wound. In between these are these sort of short story flashbacks, telling of Geralt's adventures (including how he got the wound in the first place). It might sound odd, but I really liked it. The nice, self-contained little stories give you insight into the Geralt of the present and help to craft him into an interesting character.

The Last Wish has some genre conventions (such as elves and dwarves) but it plays a bit of havoc with them. It also dabbles in fairy tales (albeit from a rather different angle), politics, morals, and a number of things that probably have more substance to them than a really poor analyst like myself can explain. There's action and adventure aplenty, too, and a bit of humor.

One thing about The Last Wish is that sometimes I'm not sure of the attitude towards women. Now, that's a pretty big problem in the fantasy genre to begin with, but in this case it's a bit hard to tell. Sometimes things happen or things are said about women that aren't pretty — even by Geralt himself. But Geralt has a tendency towards what appears to be extremely dry sarcasm, and he says some things that really contradict a misogynist outlook as well, so the verdict is still out on that one.

The writing can be, as I said, a bit awkward, with commas placed poorly and words with somewhat suspect spellings. While normally I don't feel this way, I think I really have to put this one on the editor's shoulders. Andrzej Sapkowski is Polish, he wrote this story in Polish, and he didn't do the translation. The translator is either a) someone who speaks English as a second language or b) someone who really isn't a writer (possibly even both) and they did fairly well overall. So the problems look like nothing more than extremely lazy editing. It seems like no one bothered to look over the translator's work, which I don't understand at all. But as I said, the translator did will enough that none of the errors were so egregious as to ruin the reading experience.

Finally, sometimes the stories get a little talky, and they are most certainly not all created equal. For some of them I had to read the conclusion before I actually enjoyed the story, weird as that may sound. The titular story, The Last Wish, is probably my least favorite of the bunch.

It has its uneven spots, but overall The Last Wish is worth a look. —Beth Johnson

Blood of Elves

Blood of Elves is one of those books that makes you go 'Hrm.' As in, "Hrm, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this..." It got pretty mixed reception among English readers, but I at least had the advantage going in of being somewhat aware of how different Blood of Elves would be.

It's not like The Last Wish. While The Last Wish was a series of vignettes, Blood of Elves is a straightforward novel, set around a young girl named Ciri who was promised to the Witcher guild, and the growing racial unease in Sapkowski's world. I knew that ahead of time, so I didn't have to worry about nasty surprises. Actually, I was pretty intrigued by the idea, once I realized that Ciri's back story (the tale of how she was promised to the Witchers) was in fact one of the vignettes in The Last Wish. It's not wholly unusual for an author to take a short story and have it become something more, but as this was pretty innocuous in the mix of The Last Wish's  stories, it makes for a pretty nifty idea.

Despite some of the awkwardness of translation, Sapkowski's writing translates as simple, clean, and easy to read. I find I can read it fast and with no trouble at all, lending me a lot of patience to deal with Blood of Elves' slow pace. It helps too that Sapkowski has a way of making me appreciate character types that I had long ago grown tired of, like the spunky tomboyish princess and the gruff but goodhearted dwarf. And there's Geralt, who has a certain rough charm. I find myself easily attached to much of the cast (really, does the scenario of a bunch of clueless men trying to raise a young girl ever get old?), so I'm willing to follow them along on their journeys...

Then again, there are characters like Triss Merigold, who is your typical unfortunately written fantasy female: Jealous, at times petty and spiteful, full of herself, and always taking great, smug pleasure in showing up men. Ugh. And more of the book is spent on her than I really care for. Bad author, bad! No cookie!

Really, Blood of Elves' major problem is its pacing. It's not a series of vignettes like The Last Wish, but I can't help feeling like no one bothered to tell it that. Because it's written as if it is, very episodic, with long scenes that don't end until they're done. Almost an entire chapter (and they're far from short) is spent on a meeting of a bunch of powerful rulers and the like. It's mind-numbingly boring, but wouldn't have been anywhere near as bad if it had been broken up somewhat. Nothing really flows well with this structure, and a novel should. So the draggy parts feel even worse than they actually are.

The other major problem with Blood of Elves is that not much happens. It's extremely obvious that Sapkowski isn't even trying to make these books remotely stand alone, which means reader investment. That's a rough thing if you're the sort who can't stand not having closure (I've never had any difficulty dropping a series like a bad Hobbit when need be), so it should be taken into consideration before picking up the book. One way or another, if you enjoyed The Last Wish and want to pick up Blood of Elves, be warned that the two books are very, very different in many ways and you may be disappointed.
—Beth Johnson