Is this a kissing book?

December 26, 2015 9:03 AM

Meta, Irony, Narrative, Frames, and The Princess Bride - Jo Walton takes a look at William Goldman's (or if you will S. Morgenstern's) classic novel.
posted by Artw (38 comments total)

Will be reading this later tonight when I'm not at work.

Jo Walton is a fabulous writer that deserves to be read in her own right. I just finished Jo Walton's The Just City and urge people to pick it up. I like this post.
posted by Fizz at 9:11 AM on December 26, 2015 [5 favorites]

The protagonist in Jo Walton's Among Others is Mori, a Welsh teenager in the 70s, who spends a significant portion of the book writing in her journal about Ursula LeGuin and Sam Delaney and the woes of depending on interlibrary loan. The first five paragraphs of this essay are like if Mori grew up and became a columnist for Tor. It's rather delightful, really.
posted by bl1nk at 9:21 AM on December 26, 2015 [5 favorites]

Is this where I mention my experience with the Society for the Preservation of S. Morgenstern?
posted by Samizdata at 9:36 AM on December 26, 2015 [7 favorites]

I made the mistake of letting my daughters read this before watching the movie and they found the movie version of Princess Bride more disappointing than wonderful.

It's a really good book.
posted by straight at 9:40 AM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Is this where I mention my experience with the Society for the Preservation of S. Morgenstern?

If it's interesting?

I did just recently try to track down an apparenly non-existant version of the book where the introduction was more Columbo-like.
posted by Artw at 9:44 AM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ordering Jaques the Fatalist now....
posted by benzenedream at 10:24 AM on December 26, 2015

I first came across The Princess Bride in Spider Robinson’s anthology The Best of All Possible Worlds (1980).

Hey, me too! I gobbled up the excerpt and ran out and bought the novel and gobbled that up and when I had a chance I gobbled up Magic (if you haven't read it, go read it, but don't read anything about it first, just start at page one and see if you can tear yourself away before the end)—what a wonderful writer Goldman is! And that's a great anthology in general, with a great introduction, and this is a great essay, thanks for posting it!
posted by languagehat at 11:46 AM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

This was useful for me. I only recently read the book, maybe three years ago. My main impression was that the whole thing was overhung with a cannabis haze. Now I see that it might have been a haze of literarity (literariness?) instead of cannabis.
posted by Bruce H. at 12:51 PM on December 26, 2015

The introduction certainly had more of an air of 70s sleaziness than I really anticipated when I started reading it to the kiddo.
posted by Artw at 12:56 PM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Buttercup's Baby will never happen, and I accept this. A few years ago I would have described it as the literary equivalent to Star Wars Episode VII; now I need a new metaphor.
posted by infinitewindow at 1:05 PM on December 26, 2015 [9 favorites]

Spaghetti Incident, Duke Nukem Forever, why have you all failed us?
posted by Artw at 1:33 PM on December 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

This was so confusing for me in the pre internet era, as I read it at about 9 years old. I thought all the intro parts were nonfiction, and whenever I saw an atlas that included Europe I would pore over it looking for Florin and Guilder. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize they weren't real countries.
posted by permiechickie at 1:37 PM on December 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

I suspect that's highly intentional.
posted by Artw at 1:41 PM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

There's also a missing chapter which you used to be able to order by post, as a sort of interactive element, now available by email
posted by Artw at 1:43 PM on December 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

Irony should be an ingredient, a necessary salt, without any element of irony a text can become earnest and weighed down. But irony isn’t enough on its own—when it isn’t possible for a work to be sincere about anything, irony can become poisonous, like trying to eat something that’s all salt.

A lesson for the internet, perhaps?
posted by kilozerocharliealphawhiskey at 2:05 PM on December 26, 2015 [5 favorites]

In the paperback I read back in the 70s there was a part where someone fell off a cliff and should have died but didn't. Goldman (in the intro, I think, or a footnote) said that the explanation would be sent to anyone who asked. I wrote in and got a letter that said, basically, well, I still can't explain it. Meta, indeed!
posted by CCBC at 2:28 PM on December 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

She does not get eaten by eels at this time
posted by oheso at 2:56 PM on December 26, 2015 [9 favorites]

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize they weren't real countries.

YES SAME, and all the adults I (the horribly introverted and aggressively shy kid who got burned SO MANY TIMES asking serious fact questions in my dopey sounding lisp that people thought were just sooo adorable omg) finally mustered up the initiative to ask about it were really into the whole "if we pretend about it it will Engage Her Imagination!" thing which I cannot say enough terrible things about even if I typed angrily and at length for 1,000 years and eventually a children's librarian took pity on me and was like "it's not real" in a really sort painfully kind way that has made me indebted to librarians everywhere for all my life.
posted by poffin boffin at 2:57 PM on December 26, 2015 [32 favorites]

I love the Princess Bride movie. But I've always held the book up as a prime example of a book that was considerably improved in being adapted to a movie. I read it once in the early nineties and found it repellent. Jo Walton succinctly captured what I didn't like about it -- "I think Goldman’s imaginary reader for The Princess Bride was a cynic who normally reads John Updike and a lot of what Goldman is doing in the way he wrote the book is trying to woo that reader." -- but she came to a much more generous conclusion.

I disliked on the part of the frame story that spent way to much time saying (totally making up details from vague memories here): "Now, Buttercup wasn't the most beautiful girl in Florin. She was the 7th most beautiful girl. The first most beautiful girl lived.....etc." Ew, it really gave me visions of lining up the "beautiful girls" and ranking them like horses. And, the tone of cynicism/bitterness.

Perhaps adult me, lover of meta, might like it better. I'm in the house of Coffeespoons cast offs, so maybe I can even find a copy free.
posted by Measured Out my Life in Coffeespoons at 2:57 PM on December 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

It's the opposite for me, Coffeespoons. Some of my college buddies came across the book, and I was already a Goldman fan. We would regale each other with one-liners.

When the movie came out we were excited. The performances by Crystal and Cook were great, and Falk was Falk. As for the rest ... meh.
posted by oheso at 3:06 PM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

To make a pastiche work, you have to be able to see what makes the original thing great as well as what makes it absurd, you have to be able to understand why people want it in the first place. You have to be able to see all around it. This is why Galaxy Quest works and everything else that tries to do that fails in a mean spirited way.

Also explains why Airplane! was merely very good and Talledega Nights was sheer genius.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 3:33 PM on December 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

You know, until I read this thread the only part of the novel I remember with any real clarity was, oddly enough, Billy Goldman trying to listen to the football game in his delirium.
posted by infinitewindow at 3:53 PM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

As a kid, having only seen the movie and the book's cover, I looked and looked for the "Morgenstern original" at bookstores and libraries, and was exasperated that I could only find "Goldman's version." I wanted authenticity, and to form my own opinions! Life was both simpler and more complicated before the internet.
posted by juniper at 5:36 PM on December 26, 2015 [5 favorites]

(This was after movies but before DVDs.)

Love it.
posted by mbrubeck at 6:16 PM on December 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

Artw: "Is this where I mention my experience with the Society for the Preservation of S. Morgenstern?

If it's interesting?

I did just recently try to track down an apparenly non-existant version of the book where the introduction was more Columbo-like."

Well, in the edition of Princess Bride I had, the author mentions writing a better end, but it was blocked by said Society. He then encouraged people to write to the publisher.

So I did.

Just to receive a letter stating apologetically that that same Society had blocked that approach also.
posted by Samizdata at 7:37 PM on December 26, 2015

Artw: "There's also a missing chapter which you used to be able to order by post, as a sort of interactive element, now available by email"

Yep, that's what it was.
posted by Samizdata at 7:41 PM on December 26, 2015

Slarty Bartfast: "
Also explains why Airplane! was merely very good and Talledega Nights was sheer genius."

But this is madness!
posted by Chrysostom at 8:18 PM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

I really dig the narrator's tone in the book, there are several parts of the book that only work because of his phrasing. In particular I really love the whole bit about the Thieves Quarter (and the Brute Squad!) that is foreshadowed by Yellin's:

"My men are not always too happy at the thought of entering the Thieves Quarter. Many of the thieves resist change."

posted by ethansr at 8:52 PM on December 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

So why is Westley such a dick to Buttercup, anyway?
posted by ODiV at 11:21 PM on December 26, 2015

Chrysostom: "Slarty Bartfast: "
Also explains why Airplane! was merely very good and Talledega Nights was sheer genius."

But this is madness!"

Seconded. We need a flag for "It's so wrong it's not even funny."
posted by Samizdata at 2:20 AM on December 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Measured Out my Life in Coffeespoons: I disliked on the part of the frame story that spent way to much time saying (totally making up details from vague memories here): "Now, Buttercup wasn't the most beautiful girl in Florin. She was the 7th most beautiful girl. The first most beautiful girl lived.....etc." Ew, it really gave me visions of lining up the "beautiful girls" and ranking them like horses. And, the tone of cynicism/bitterness.

Then don't ever read Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade, because the contrast between the pages where he agonizes about how Butch Cassidy can't ever lose because he's the hero and the end of his script for The Stepford Wives dynamited all my respect for him.
posted by sukeban at 2:35 AM on December 27, 2015

The big difference I always found between the book and the movie was in a single crutial scene - where Buttercup is "wooed" into marriage. E.G. she's told she will marry Humperdink or die, and she says, "Well, I'd rather not die."

I've always through removing that scene messed with Buttercup's characterization, because in the book it's clear she's simply Not Dying For Now Despite Having Lost Everything, but in the movie it's never clear why she agrees to marry Humperdink so soon. WITH that scene it becomes clear Westley was wrong for not trusting her, and that she is a much more realistic and thoughtful person than the movie allows for her. I was always kind of bummed it wasn't included in the movie, though I understand why it wasn't for pacing issues they could have at least MENTIONED it.
posted by Deoridhe at 12:06 PM on December 27, 2015 [5 favorites]

Then don't ever read Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade

Honestly, after reading Brothers, the bizarre sequel to Marathon Man, I'm a little concerned about Goldman
posted by thelonius at 1:42 PM on December 27, 2015

The best part about the Princess Bride novel is the scene early on where Buttercup confronts Westley at his little hovel about how much she loves him. There's this long paragraph where she goes on and on about how every moment she loves him more than the last moment and you think she's never going to stop. Then finally she does, and Westley shuts the door in her face (which, honestly, is the only sane response to a brain-vomit of that magnitude, I think~). Absolutely hysterical. I had been in love with the movie for years when I read the book for the first time, and I was a little skeptical because I had also read all the introduction from Goldman as non-fiction, but then I got to that scene and was sold forever.
posted by ashirys at 5:31 PM on December 27, 2015

In my much younger days I spent a large amount of time in Aruba, where the currency was the Dutch Guilder. In 1986, a year before the movie, they switched to the Aruban Florin. (As well as to a mostly autonomous government, but I digress.)

As with any aspect of government there were always pro-this and anti-that stances. Reading the story with that pre-existing conflict already firmly entrenched in my psyche added a whole layer to the background story of the competing cities.
posted by Blue_Villain at 11:24 AM on December 28, 2015 [3 favorites]

My father, once a reference librarian at the Seattle Public Library, was approached by a patron leading him on a delve through history and literature for a Lost Work from two Forgotten City-States.

It took my dad half a day of head-scratching and puzzlement to finally fit the pieces together and find The Princess Bride. He had to sigh and call the patron back and say "Sorry, that's fiction. Yeah, that is fiction too."

I believe he concluded by recommending a translation of Cervantes, who played those games far more deftly than even Goldman had.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 4:17 AM on December 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

You mean Jorge Luis Borges, right?
posted by sukeban at 5:35 AM on December 31, 2015

Borges was, of course, heavily inspired by Cervantes.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:17 AM on January 1, 2016