3.5 stars
This book deserves some attention!
I found it so hilarious I cannot understand why I did not read it before.
The book combines elements of comedy, adventure, fantasy, romantic love, romance and fairy tale, and is presented as an abridgment (or “the good parts version”) of a longer work by S. Morgenstern.
Apparently, Goldman presented it as a gift to his son after remembering the huge importance it had in his own life, ever since his father read it to him at his sickbed. But his son did not appreciate it, so Goldman decided to abridge the version he had, thus his “commentary” asides are constant throughout. I have to admit I started it a bit prejudiced, but it made me change my mind after the first chapter.
First of all a quick synopsis:
What happens when the most beautiful girl in the world marries the handsomest prince of all time and he turns out to be…well…a lot less than the man of her dreams?
In a Renaissance-era world, Buttercup, one of the world’s twenty most beautiful women, and her tomboyish life on a farm with her parents, her horse, and Westley, their farm-boy. One afternoon a band of Florinese royalty appear on the farm, and while Buttercup watches a well-dressed Countess watch Westley, she falls suddenly, madly, jealously in love with this man she has known all her life. She professes her love to him, and he leaves immediately to America to seek his fortune, and soon is reported to have been murdered by the Dread Pirate Roberts. Buttercup is broken, and vows never to love again.
After that? Things take an unsuspectable and fast-paced series of twists. My personal thoughts? Mixed and a bit awkward (maybe).
Buttercup and Westley? Amazing crazy couple…she is the nuttiest sweetheart ever, and I couldn’t stop laughing every time she changed her mind.
On the surface they seem quite a traditional couple….wait what? They are far from it. They are an awkward couple made of a dumb girl that realizes she is in love with her farm boy after she thinks a noble woman wants him and….he tells her she has misunderstood him for years, because he kept telling her “I love you” and she only heard “As you wish”.
Ok, then there’s a lot of fencing, fighting, torture, poison, “true love”, hate, revenge, giants, hunters, bad man, good men, snakes, spiders, beasts, pain, death, brave and coward men, the strangest men, chases, escapes, lies, truths, “passion”, miracles….but most of all an hilarious love story between these two undefinable beings:
1. a farm boy who tries to go to America, but is almost killed only to become the king of pirates and then returns to his homeland to kidnap the love of his life, but is caught and tortured ah….he dies, but is somehow resuscitated;
2. a milkmaid who is the most beautiful woman (but never showers) and equally dumb. She has to marry a prince, but then she is kidnapped by a strange trio first and the love of her life after…until she decides to betray him and have him captured.
Favourite characters? Inigo Montoya and Fezzik – a comical duo of so-called thieves and the weirdest of possible abductors – because of dialogues like:
“I’m not trying to make this a downer, understand. I mean, I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drop”.
But my favorite line?
“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
The falling in love part, the chase, the masking and unmasking, the crazy characters, the the interactions of two layers of writers, first William Goldman and then S. Morgenstern…the laugh about the pirate world with the explanation on how the title of the “Dread Pirate Roberts” passes on…well, reading this book was a never ending series of laughs.
And the prince Humperdinck? His Zoo of Death is some kind of Jurassic Park from another time and space, and totally reflects his view of the world. Fantastic.
Goldman’s life keep getting mixed with the chapters of the novel, but the mix does not work against the book as a whole: it gives the reader some context and “understanding” about the process that brought it to the surface…in a journey through a tangled jungle of allusions and puzzlement.
The Errant Reader 