Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay very much worth a second look (or read)

I didn't weep as much the second time I read Tigana as I did the first time over 10 years ago.  There are few books that will still cause me to catch my breath in sections, especially ones that I am rereading, however after 10 years of sitting on my shelf it still had the power to take my breath away at least once.
Kay is a romantic writer.  I don't mean that in the sense that there are a fair number of people wandering around with frilly bodices being ripped this way and that.  I mean Romantic with a capital "R" as in larger-than-life people who are very earnest and feel things very deeply.  The voice of each narrator sets the stage for how the reader will perceive the story.  The narrator of Tigana, like Tolkien who was a very large and early influence on Kay as he was one of the contributors to The Silmarillion, is a very serious person on the whole who states things in a seriousness usually only attributed to a teen in the throes of their first love.
The story here is a very serious one.  That is of a peninsula on a far planet where magic, while not quite common, is prevalent enough.  This peninsula resembles a renaissance Italy where the Medici or the Borgia might reign except there is magic and two moons.  There are nine provinces of the palm, which is the way that this peninsula is referred to,  and as the prologue opens they are invaded from the West by one sorcerer king and from the East by another sorcerer.  Each captures 4 of the provinces and achieves a stable detente with the other.  In the process, the King of the west loses his son in the battle over one of the provinces.  In his anger and sorrow, he casts a dreadful spell causing all who were not born there to forget the name of this province and to not even be able to hear it if it was spoken to them.  A very dreadful form of historic revisionism that was inspired, so the author states in his postscript, by the Stalin/Maoist historical revisions of the last forty years.
Our earnest and serious heroes must try to find a way to pit the two tyrants against each other and thus destroy them both, which of course they do. But there are ancient legends told along the way, a few deaths by overly well intentioned people who sacrificed in a good cause or for whom the climax of the events was more than they could live with.
As a sometimes serious and earnest person, I enjoyed this book immensely again the second time.  The surprise turns here and there still held some magic for me.  However, I can see that an earnest younger man might find this novel to be almost more than he could absorb.  Thus is the power of the epic carried forward.  This work was the first full work of Kay's that I had read (other than the editing of Tolkien's writing).  I had read quite a bit more of his work after this and found it to be improved.  Still very earnest, but with more humor, which as Shakespeare knew was the perfect accoutrement for a romantic drama.