You good folks silently, but politely and patiently, endure a constant drumbeat of my blog's "book reviews," reviews that I also copy and paste onto Goodreads. A less silent (but still affable) Goodreads viewer has advised me that my book reviews aren't really book reviews. And they aren't. They wouldn't pass muster as essays in Miss Feeny's eleventh grade English Literature class.
I guess that, for purposes of my blog, I use "book review" as a term of art for "my personal reactions to a book I've read, along with a summary of its plot." Because virtually no one reads my blog, I feel free to use my "book reviews" simply as a way to avoid forgetting a book as soon as I've read it.
Or, to summarize, "stuff it!"
Today's post -- and I will try (but fail) to be brief -- is neither a book review nor a "book review." I'm simply noting a peculiarity that amused me. Allow me to explain.
In 1987, Twentieth Century Fox released The Princess Bride. It received very high ratings -- from both professional critics and those viewers who viewed it -- on Rotten Tomatoes. Not that many viewers viewed it, however, nor did it apparently receive any major awards. But it became, as we say, a "cult classic."
I've never seen it. In fact, it's only recently that I'd even heard of it. But suddenly, serious people who -- I had assumed -- would not care for a movie about someone named "Princess Buttercup" were acting aggrieved that I'd never seen it. "Oh, you have to!" they exclaimed. My resolve to avoid what I assumed was a campy takeoff on the Pirates of Penzance -- which in turn was a campy takeoff on Il Trovatore and other cultural icons -- was only stiffened.
But when reading The Temple of Gold by William Goldman (see last prior post) I learned that Goldman had written the book on which the movie was based (and assisted with the screenplay) … Oh well, I thought, why not? After writing at one time a review of a Charlie Chan novel, I couldn't really be overly fastidious.
Goldman "claims" that an author named S. Morgenstern wrote The Princess Bride at some unknown time in the past. When Goldman was a boy, recovering from pneumonia, his father read him the story, chapter by chapter, night after night. At times, Goldman felt his father was skipping portions, but his father assured him that if he didn't like it, he'd have to blame Morgenstern. The dad was just reading the book.
In the fullness of time, Goldman had a son of his own, Jason. After much difficulty, he located a copy of The Princess Bride, which he gave to the boy on his tenth birthday. You who are parents can guess the result. His wife assured him:
He tried to read it. He did read the first chapter. Chapter Two was impossible for him, so when he'd made a sufficient and reasonable attempt, I told him to stop. Different people have different tastes.
Goldman didn't much like his son anyway, and this was the final straw.
But then he read the book himself and realized the problem. Morgenstern had written the book in part as a satire on the pretensions of royalty -- a serious issue. But Goldman's dad had read him only "the action stuff, the good parts." Chapter Two contained "sixty pages of text dealing with Prince Humperdinck's ancestry and how his family got control of Florin and this wedding and that child begetting this one over here..." Golden couldn't bear to read it himself. (When my own mother read me Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, I begged her to omit pages of description of undersea life, lovely coral, etc., and get on with the action. She was a purist, and I had to listen to it all.)
And so, Golden decided to write an abridged version, a version leaving out vast sections of boring stuff that might appeal to a scholarly adult with an eye for Morgenstern's sense of irony, but not to the casual reader. And not to a child. Certainly not to his own thick-headed child.
That alone might (or might not) be an amusing way to present a fantasy/fairy tale. But Goldman takes it to another level. As the Princess story proceeds, he interrupts it continually with asides (in italics) explaining his justification for excising portions of the "original" Morgenstern text, and detailing his arguments with editors and others regarding the propriety in so doing. At one point, he becomes so incensed at his publisher that he begs his readers to write the editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt at their New York address to voice their support for Goldman's position.
Goldman's professional life is well known. He's written a number of novels and a large number of high profile screenplays, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men. The preparation of the abridged text, the arguments with editors, the travel about the country and abroad associated with the book -- as well as subsequent work on the Princess Bride screenplay -- all purportedly took place while documented events in his real life were occurring -- events to which he repeatedly refers. The reader loses his sense of which reality to believe.
The European country in which the events of The Princess Bride occur is the fictitious Florin, and its adversary neighbor, the equally fictitious Guilder. In a post-text chapter, Goldman discusses flying to Florin to check out surviving ruins of places described in Morgenstern's original novel -- a novel based on events in Florin's actual history. He describes his Air France flight to Brussels, where he changed planes to take the "InterItalia" flight to Guilder, "and then just the short hop to Florin City." This follows his visit to Bangor, Maine, where he had a bitter argument with Stephen King as to which of them would do the screenplay for a sequel to the original movie.
One comes close to losing one's mind. Let me make myself clear: To the best of my knowledge, Florin and Guilder are fictitious countries. Goldman did not have the arguments with either Mr. King or his own editors that he claims. Goldman's dad never read the Morgenstern's original to him, no matter how touching the father-son bond described by him may seem. Goldman never gave the Morganstern book to his son Jacob, because Goldman does not have, nor ever has had, a son. He has two daughters.
But another reason he did not read it to his son is that there never was a Morganstern original for him to give. In fact, there never was an author named S. Morganstern.
You must believe me. As impossible as it may seem after reading this book, not only is the underlying story of the Princess Bride a fairy tale, a work of fiction -- as everyone agrees. So is the entire book, including all of Goldman's comments about his work on the abridgement, and how the work affected his life. It is so easy to lose track of this fact. Let me emphasize -- the entire book is not only fiction. It is a complex tissue of outright lies!
Except, of course, where it's not. Goldman did write screenplays. He's probably even pals with Stephen King.
How did the underlying story of the Princess Bride come out? Has that been lost in all the wrangling over the meta aspects of the book? Well, didn't you see the movie? How did that come out -- since I haven't seen it? Did Princess Buttercup marry her pirate boyfriend? Or did Prince Humperdinck kill her in pursuit of his nefarious planned war with Guilder?
How does the book end?
You'd better read it yourself. Why? Because "Oh, you have to."
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