![]() And I lay there, eyes kind of closed, my body slowly beginning the long flow back to strength. ![]() … Each night my father read to me, chapter by chapter, always fighting to sound the words properly, to nail down the sense. Me the sports fanatic, me the game freak, me the only ten-year-old in Illinois with a hate on for the alphabet wanted to know what happened next. But after that night, everything changed: For the first time in my life, I became actively interested in a book. Prior to this, Goldman hadn’t been much of a reader. One evening, his father sat down at the end of his bed and began reading to him from S. His only real pleasure during his convalescence was listening to sports on the radio. After a short hospital stay, he was sent home to recuperate and spent several weeks in bed. We are told that Goldman’s father migrated to America at 16 and that his English was always very “immigranty.” In 1941, when he was 10, Goldman fell ill with pneumonia. The beginning of The Princess Bride-in which Goldman presents the reader with a chatty, informal introduction to the work and to himself-resembles the opening of Kurt Vonnegut’s metafiction Breakfast of Champions (published the same year). ![]() In 1983, Goldman would publish a second novel behind the Morgenstern pseudonym, titled The Silent Gondoliers, but this time he removed all mention of himself, even from the copyright page. John Barth became a literary superstar (among the academic set, anyway) with books like The Sot-Weed Factor (which, like The Princess Bride, is a fantastical comic adventure supposedly written by a fictional author) and Giles Goat-Boy (the text of which, Barth writes in the foreword, was said to have been written by a computer). Back in the 1990s, before Internet access became commonplace, confirming the existence of a small defunct European statelet would have involved a trip to the library.īut readers in the 1970s might have been more alive to Goldman’s ruse. European history is littered with microstates that rose briefly and then vanished without leaving much of a trace. Such a place never existed, but it’s not surprising that many 21st-century American readers don’t know the names of every current and former European kingdom. Morgenstern was from the tiny European nation of Florin, located somewhere between Germany and Sweden, which is where the story’s action takes place. In his introduction, Goldman tells us that S. And when I did, I found myself sympathizing with all those people who still believe that, somewhere in the world, there exists an unedited edition. Only about 10 years ago did I actually get around to reading the novel. My wife and I saw the film when it first appeared in American theaters, and we have rewatched it several times since on VHS and DVD. I don't know who needs to hear this but most of the 1-star Amazon reviews for The Princess Bride by William Goldman are people absolutely IRATE that it isn't "the original book" and is instead an "abridged version" by "the screenplay writer." /zwTqx1WIPl- Lauren Thoman March 3, 2023Īlthough I was a big fan of William Goldman, I had never read The Princess Bride. Having fallen in love with the story via the Hollywood film, they were now looking for the ur-text. “A novel that comments on its own status as a text.” When the customer had left, my colleague told me that a lot of people still believe there is an original version of the novel available somewhere, written by Morgenstern. “It’s metafiction,” my colleague explained. Goldman made him up.” The customer wasn’t convinced. The first time this happened, a younger colleague who had worked there longer than I had told my customer, “ The Princess Bride was written by William Goldman. Every few months, someone would come into the store and ask if we had an unabridged edition of S. In the 1990s, I worked at a Tower Books store in Sacramento. Yes, all that text actually appeared on the cover of the book’s first hardcover edition (all but the first three words have been scrubbed from the covers of most subsequent editions). Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The “Good Parts” Version. Unlike Rob Reiner’s much-loved 1987 film adaptation, the book’s full title is The Princess Bride: S. In a bizarre introduction (more about which in a moment), Goldman claims merely to have acted as editor. The book purports to be an abridged edition of a classic adventure story written by someone named Simon Morgenstern. Even by the eccentric standards of fantasy literature, William Goldman’s 1973 novel The Princess Bride is extremely odd.
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