The Princess Bride
I have wanted to read this book for a long time, and somehow just never got around to it. I know the movie well, and have loved it for years, but reading the book behind a movie is always a must for me.So now I've read it, and I must confess, I'm more than a bit let down. William Goldman is an excellent writer of screenplays, from what I've seen of his movies, but I think I understand his self-professed lack of success as a novelist now. The actual story of The Princess Bride, I love: Buttercup and Westley, Inigo and Fezzik, they are all wonderful characters, and the humour in the book is fantastic, their story is intriguing. I just wish their story had truly been the main part of the book.
But instead, Goldman's literary device of pretending to be the "abridger" of another man's work (Morgenstern) takes over in the most heavy-handed way possible. The story of how the book has been passed down through generations of his family, how he came to want to abridge the book, how it became a passion for him, squabbles with publishers, a lot of babble about the country of Florin . . . it all annoyed me. It took me out of the world of the story, and in my mind, that's never a good thing to do. Why would an author interrupt his own story ceaselessly, so annoyingly, and to what point? Does he really think we believe any of it? He mixes obvious facts (about his family) with fiction (his research about Morgenstern and Florin) to such a point that I often found myself thinking, "Can we PLEASE just get back to the story?" If all that was supposed to BE part of the story, well . . . it didn't work for me, Mr, Goldman. All it accomplished was that it jerked me out of the flow of the Princess Bride's tale so many times, I couldn't enjoy the book.
In the end, I really don't know what else to say about the book except, "Disappointed." And I want to go watch the movie now; at least there I won't be interrupted by SO much of this framing story that, honestly, is really not that interesting.
