Khaavren Romances - Writing Style

Writing Style

Paarfi narrates with a distinctive voice that satirizes the flowery and verbose style of Alexandre Dumas and his contemporaries. Paths of the Dead includes an essay by Brust's editor, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, titled "How to Write Like Paarfi of Roundwood", which identifies 17 characteristics of Paarfi's style. Many of the Khaavren Romances include essays credited to Paarfi's Dragaeran colleagues, who use similarly overwrought language.

A Dragaeran essay (in fact written by Pamela Dean) in Five Hundred Years After notes that Paarfi writes in a style similar to Redwreath and Goldstar Have Traveled to Deathsgate, a Dragaeran play. This is a reference to Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Brust took inspiration from that play, especially the "questions" game, in writing the Romances' bantering dialogue. A running joke throughout the series is that characters must ask a question multiple times before receiving an answer.

Paarfi's writing also makes heavy use of metafiction, as he frequently calls attention to his twin roles as historian and storyteller. He often pauses the story to defend the historicity of a certain plot detail or to explain a literary technique that he is about to use. Paarfi's regular intrusions, combined with the biographical information included in several of the peripheral essays, make him into a frame tale for the series.