Why did The Princess Bride captivate America into the of Watergate year? Nathaniel Rich revisits William Goldman’s classic and finds it grippingly readable—and bluntly truthful.
In 1973—“the 12 months of infamy”—the final American bombs were fallen on Cambodia, OPEC issued an oil embargo, the currency markets crashed, and Woodward and Bernstein unveiled that there clearly was more towards the Watergate break-in than had first showed up. Also by US requirements, it absolutely was minute of extravagant uneasiness, disillusionment, and mania. In the middle of this maelstrom came a strange and determinedly anachronistic brand new novel by William Goldman. It told the fairy-tale tale of a Princess known as Buttercup, her abduction by the prince that is evil a six-fingered count, along with her rescue by a soft-hearted giant, a vengeance-mad swordsman, and a debonair masked hero called Westley. It is hard to think about a novel that bears less connection to its time compared to Princess Bride. Which can be just what made The Princess Bride therefore prompt.
It is feasible that the dubious audience might discern particular Nixonian characteristics in Humperdinck, Goldman’s vain, conspiratorial, power-hungry prince, or see in Count Rugen, the prince’s diabolical, merciless, hypocritical hatchet man, a medieval Robert Haldeman. But Goldman isn’t interested in satire; and it’s also one of the novel’s central motifs that satire is a bloodless, empty exercise, destroyed on all however the many pretentious, scholarly visitors. There clearly was a great amount of room for findings with this type, for “The Princess Bride” is just a novel within a novel. The legendary Florinese writer (Florin being a country “set between where Sweden and Germany would eventually settle”), and read to Goldman as a child by his father, a Florinese immigrant in a thirty-page, first-person introduction, Goldman explains that it was written by S. [Read more…]