Subject: THE PRINCESS BRIDE, William Goldman

From: [email-masked] (C. Roald)
Date: 11 Jul 92 21:42:44 GMT

'He'll never catch up!' the Sicilian cried. 'Inconceivable!'
	'You keep using that word!' the Spaniard snapped. 'I do not
	think it means what you think it means.'
			-- THE PRINCESS BRIDE, William Goldman

This book caught my eye on the bookshop wall, because I happen to love the 
movie. But I'll confess to being hesitant about buying it, partly because I
already knew the story, and partly because of the tacky cover. It's got a
picture of Westley and Buttercup on the cover, a title announcing "William
Goldman's Hot Fairy-Tale Classic", and one of those obnoxious "Now a Terrific
Motion Picture" labels. Altogether, it looks like it belongs in the bargain bin
at Woolco--certainly not the kind of book a college student with some respect
for intelligence should be buying. I bought it anyway, because, as I say, I
happen to love the movie.

I won't do much of a plot summary, since if you've seen the movie, you know how
it goes. Goldman did his own screenplay, so it's very close. (Close enough that
the voices from the movie kept echoing in my head.) Those of you who didn't
like the movie probably need read no further. For those who haven't seen it,  I
can't think of a better way to describe it than Goldman's. It's about "Fencing.
Fighting. Torture. Poison. True Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men.
Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and
descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases.
Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passions. Miracles."

The story is wonderful, fun, absorbing, and never, ever takes itself seriously.
There isn't enough of that around, and to my mind, THE PRINCESS BRIDE is worth
buying as a light-hearted upper alone. Except that's not all it is--the fairy-
tale comes framed with the tale of the father reading to his sick son, and 
every so often Goldman interrupts the story with authorial comment, and in those
italicised passages is a simple wisdom that it does good to be reminded of, now
and again.

Go ahead. Buy the book. Revel in the tacky cover. You won't regret it.

	"I'm not trying to make this a downer, understand. I  mean,
 	I really do think that love is the best thing in the world,
	except  for  cough drops.  But I also have to say,  for the 
	umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair.  It's  just  fairer 
	than death, that's all."
			-- THE PRINCESS BRIDE, William Goldman
				
(I'm going to stick in the %codes now, and down after them is a bit of 
discussion that has more in common with criticism than review, though I won't
presume to dignify it by that name.  It should at any rate be considered a bit
of a spoiler, because it contains my answer to a puzzle in this book that kept
me wondering all the while I was reading it. Ideally, you'd clip this posting,
go read the book, come back and read my comments. Right. Sure.)

%A   Goldman, William
%T   The Princess Bride
%C   New York
%I   Ballantine (A Del Rey Book)
%D   1973
%G   ISBN 0-345-34803-6
%P   283 pp.
%O   US$4.95, CDN$6.50

SPOILER ALERT



Those who've read the book may have noticed that I have listed William Goldman
as the author, despite the fact that the title page says:

		  THE PRINCESS BRIDE

		   S. Morgenstern's 
	      Classic Tale of True Love
		  and High Adventure

   	       The 'good parts' version
		      Abridged by

	 	    William Goldman

Goldman begins the book with a long preface (29 pp) describing how he got
pneumonia when he was ten, and his father read him THE PRINCESS BRIDE, and how
it's his favourite book in the whole world, though he's never read it, and how
he tried to give it to his son for his tenth birthday, but it's incredibly
rare, and how he discovered the original was long and tedious and his father
had only read him the good parts, and how he decided to abridge it to a 'good
parts'  version. The preface is long and sincere and very personal, and I feel
like a heel for saying I don't believe it.

I think Goldman is stringing us along; I don't believe any Simon Morgenstern
ever wrote this book just after the First World War; I believe that the
'preface' is a piece of fiction as much a part of the novel as any of the eight
numbered chapters that follow it.

Why? For starters, Morgenstern's name doesn't appear on the cover at all, 
though I didn't notice that until later. What really bothered me was that 
Goldman, in the preface and in his "abridger's comments" interjections, kept
referring to Florin and Guilder, the fictional countries in the novel, as real
places. He claimed that both his father and S. Morgenstern himself were 
immigrants from Florin. He claimed that there's a Professor Bongiorno at
Columbia whose specialty is "Florinese Studies", and who has written about
Morgenstern's "satiric genius." My university library has never heard of Simon
Morgenstern. I checked. 

No, everything about this book says Late-Twentieth-Century, and Goldman-is-the-
author. I won't pretend to be a competent literary critic, but I have a few
ideas on why he may have written it like this. 

The net effect, is that Goldman not only writes the story--he gets to tell it,
too. That includes the right to make the marginal comments and digressions of
a wise adult reading a bedtime story, which Goldman does.

It's an interesting effect.