Instead he writes a romantic, adventurous and very funny book and decides to cloak it in this outside story of how his father read it to him as a child and how he reacted (this is what made it so easy to frame the film within the manner of a grandfather reading it to his grandson – it’s the same way the book is written). There was never a previous version of The Princess Bride. It messed with both my younger sister’s head and my mother’s head when they both read it. Goldman grew up being read the book and when he discovered as an adult how much of it he had never been exposed to and how the book had gone out of print, he sought to rescue it from obscurity by abridging it and releasing a “good parts” version.Įxcept that’s all a bunch of crap. It is long and, though filled with romance and adventure, very long-winded, with long digressions worthy of Victor Hugo. Morganstern’s Princess Bride is a long novel that satirizes the European aristocracy and class system. Why is that? Well, because The Princess Bride as Goldman writes it is the abridgment of an old Florinese classic by S. So that’s the second time now I have called it post-modernist. Of course, both the film and the original novel come from the same writer, William Goldman, but it is remarkable how good a job he did at taking his post-modernist classic and turning it into such a wonderful film. But how many of those people know the book? How many of them know that so much of what they love about the film comes directly from the book. An entire generation seems to know every word of the film, which is pretty remarkable given that it finished 41st in the box office tally for 1987. Millions upon millions of people are familiar with The Princess Bride. It is exactly the right line for the right book and it belongs where it is. The line would become slightly different in the film (“Who said life is fair? Where is that written?) and it works for the film just like this line works for the novel.

The last line tells you all you need to know. The first line informs you that you moving into a post-modernist world, the story of a book before we even get to the book. This book could stand proudly on a shelf with A Tale of Two Cities, The Catcher in the Rye and Lolita (all of which are on this list by the way) based simply on its first and last lines. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.” But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn’t fair. Last Lines: “I mean, I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops.First Line: “This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.”.The deluxe slipcase 1st Edition of The Princess Bride by William Goldman (1973)

Princess and the bride book