I was hooked on the story, a phrase Goldman himself uses to describe his own childhood transformation from illiterate disaster to compulsive reader and writer. The Princess Bride is two tales in two eras intertwining seamlessly. Then I was riveted by Buttercup’s odyssey and by Goldman’s relationship to her story. I wanted to live in the Manhattan described in the book’s introduction, the one of a thousand used bookshops: the Nine-nine-nine, the Fourth Avenue Bookshop, Abromowitz’s, Argosy. You want layers of complexity? Crack open The Princess Bride. I was transported to Chicago in the autumn of 1941, then to a frosty winter in Manhattan in the 1970s, and at last to the mythical country of Florin, in the era “(before France but after Paris.)” (The book’s use of parenthetical asides is one of its unique charms.) Goldman is a hopelessly unreliable narrator and his untrustworthiness is the book’s cornerstone. I sat at my bedroom window and read The Princess Bride cover to cover without stopping. How much I longed to live in any place other than Los Angeles! How much I longed for adventure, for other eras and places. The view from my bedroom window was of a stretch of Sunset Boulevard that, in overcast weather, looked a bit like a New York City sidewalk if I used my imagination. I was twelve years old when I stumbled onto The Princess Bride. The Princess Bride is built on that confession. In the book’s introduction, William Goldman confesses that he does not believe in true love or high adventure. The book is deeply brilliant and hysterically funny and darkly cynical. The movie is clever and funny and lighthearted. How is that possible? Simply read the introduction and you will see how much more complex, how much darker and more emotionally satisfying the book is. The first thing to know is that the beloved movie very little resembles the book that inspired it. So it is with The Princess Bride (by William Goldman), and me. Sometimes a book changes you every time you read it.
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