A Book A Week - Week 38: The Princess Bride

This week's book:
  The Princess Bride   by William Goldman

Grade:  A+

Better than the movie, and the movie is one of the greatest of all time.  You need to read this book.

Next week:
 Five Days At...

I'm sorry... what?  You want more detail about The Princess Bride?  Sure, I can do that.

William Goldman is a celebrated screenwriter with impeccable credits, including two Academy Awards.  He wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All The President's Men, Marathon Man.  And, of course, The Princess Bride.*
   Before it was an amazing screenplay and one of my favorite movies ever, though, The Princess Bride was a book.  A fantastic book, it turns out.  William Goldman has been one of my screenwriting heroes for some time. Now he's one of my book-writing heroes too.

The set-up runs a little like the framing sequences in the movie.  The author claims that his near-illiterate father read the book aloud to him when he was sick with pneumonia, and that it was this book by S. Morgenstern that turned him into the literary powerhouse he is.  He tried to find the book for his son on his tenth birthday to recreate his own discovery on his tenth.  His son didn't like the book.  When Goldman read the book (keep in mind this is all fiction too) he discovered that the original Florinese writer had produced a work that was unreadable, full of pages of discussions of hats and customs and whatnot.  Things that didn't interest scholars let alone ten-year-old boys.
   When his father read it aloud, come to find out, he skipped all the boring parts and just included the good parts.  The swordfighting, poison, pirates, spiders, pain, death, chases, and miracles.  So what Goldman did was abridge the original, to make a book that matched the one his immigrant father read to him when he was sick.  That's still fiction, there has never been a country called Florin.  I checked.

The book follows the movie, for the most part.  But there is so much more in the book.  So much more.  If you've seen the movie you know the plot.  But do you know who Inigo's father actually was, and why the Count killed him?  Do you know Fezzik's story, or that he was a Turk before he became French and Andre the Giant?  You'll have to read the book to discover these things.

I loved every moment I spent reading this book.  Yes, it's from an older literary tradition, one where the author speaks directly to the reader sometimes, but it still holds up.  It's better than many of the newer books I've read during this year of a book a week.

Who should read this book?  If you loved the movie you'll love this book, I guarantee it.  If you didn't see the movie then you absolutely need to read this book, and then see the movie.  If you love adventure stories, if you love love stories, if you love being immersed in one man's clearly overactive imagination then you'll love this book.
   If you hated the movie then... you're clearly a communist and you deserve a punch in the throat.  How could you not like The Princess Bride?  What the hell is wrong with you? 

* he has also made millions upon millions of dollars as the uncredited script doctor - essentially ghost writer - on many very successful Hollywood movies.  There are rumors about which ones (Good Will Hunting, for example), but you'll never find out for certain.  Mr. Goldman has made a fortune by keeping his mouth shut. 

Next week:
 Five Days At Memorial   by Sheri Fink
Back to non-fiction.  The story of what happened at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in the days during and immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit the city.  I don't think this is going to be as fun as The Princess Bride.