The Princess Bride

"I encountered The Princess Bride in the library in the late seventies. It was a book I never heard of, though I had heard of William Goldman. I don’t think I knew then that he wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But I had read Marathon Man and I had read Magic . I thought that he wrote scary thrillers. So, I went into The Princess Bride cold and I fell in love. Sometimes you can fall in love both with the tale and the way it’s told. What I love so much about The Princess Bride was the way William Goldman framed the story as a fairy tale by a fictional author being read by a father, who skips the boring stuff, to his skeptical son, who is slowly won over. That in itself is a delight. And then the story within this frame is wonderful. “My most exciting daily journey is to the compost bin and back” I met Goldman in about 1983, ’84, back before The Princess Brid e became a film. I remember telling him that The Princess Bride was my favorite of all his books. He mentioned that there were plans afoot to make a movie, but that he didn’t think it would happen because it had fallen through before. He was beautifully wrong. The Princess Bride movie came out and although it made no impact at first, people ultimately fell in love with it. Anybody who loved the movie should go read the novel. And anybody who has never heard of the movie, should go read the novel. It’s William Goldman, at his best, writing for the sheer joy of it and that joy manifests on every page. Tolkien pointed out that fairy tales weren’t made for kids. Fairy tales existed for adults but when they became unfashionable they were consigned to kids, much in the way that the furniture adults no longer cared for was consigned to the nursery in a big old Victorian house. They became children’s fiction. We love these stories when we first encounter them. We hear them over and over and we start looking for other things. The Princess Bride reminds how much adults can enjoy an elegantly told fairy tale."