“Terrible things can happen when you’re overtired. I was overtired the night your father proposed.”
Buttercup’s Mother
The Princess Bride has been one of my favorite movies for decades. The book has been languishing on my bookshelf for nearly as long. While what makes the film great is there, numerous extraneous tangents and long expository interludes ruin the book’s flow and destroy the experience.
The version of the book that I read was the 25th-anniversary reprint with a chapter of Buttercup’s Baby. I don’t know if all versions have this addition, but it is not worth the effort of reading as it adds nothing to the story and makes the ending worse.
The majority of my problem is with how the book is structured. The author sets up this convoluted story of how he came to abridge this book that his father read to him as a child, but he didn’t realize that his father wasn’t reading the entire book, just the “good parts.” With the introduction, the set-up took nearly 50 incredibly dull pages.
Even once the story starts rolling, the author keeps butting in with anecdotes about the abridging process and asides from the original author. Some of them are entertaining and/or familiar as the grandfather in the movie makes use of them. I found most of them annoying as they would abruptly cut into the story flow and subject you to a long-winded spiel when I just wanted to read about Westley, Buttercup, Inigo, and Fezzik.
Their story is faithfully told in the movie, which is not surprising given that William Goldman wrote the screenplay. The additional background information made the characters more entertaining. Even the off-kilter ending was amusing as it implied that the characters would continue to bumble their way to a happy ending.
The addition of Buttercup’s Baby was abysmal, and I wish I hadn’t bothered to read it. It includes another 22 pages of introduction about how he came to abridge this chapter. Then, the chapter itself added nothing to the story and concluded with an unhappier ending. I probably would have given this book 3 stars if I skipped those 79 pages.
I will definitely rewatch the movie in the future, but this book does not deserve to be re-read. Everything that I liked in the book, I can find in the film without the irritants.
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