The Princess Bride

A Florinese romance of true love and high adventure, abridged by a screenwriter who claims his father read it to him, leaving out the pages about packing and the history of Guilder.

Tolkien pretends to have translated a manuscript. Goldman pretends to have cut one. Both men are lying in the service of making the object in your hands feel found rather than made, and Goldman is funnier about it.

He tells you his father read him The Princess Bride and skipped the dull bits — the Florinese court satire, the endless packing — and that the novel you are holding is that performance, written down, after a disappointing reread of the “real” Morgenstern. The joke depends on you almost believing in S. Morgenstern, citizen of a country that does not exist, author of a satire that was never the point. True love, high adventure, and a frame that keeps elbowing the story to tell you which parts were worth keeping.

This is the inverse of The Joye of Snacks. There, a real cookery book stands next to a fictional one and is not it. Here, the real book claims to be the fictional one, minus the pages Goldman never wrote. You can order it tonight. You cannot order the unabridged Morgenstern, because the unabridged Morgenstern is the joke.

On the readability rating. Yes — of the abridgement. The Florinese original remains, by design, a rumour Goldman is glad he spared you.

In-world history

According to the frame, Morgenstern wrote a long courtly novel in Florinese; Goldman, hired to abridge it for American readers, discovers that the original is stuffed with Florinese politics and packing lists, and cuts to the adventure his father had performed aloud. There is no Florinese original. There is Goldman.

Why it matters

The book you can buy insists it is not the book. Goldman is the editor; Morgenstern is the author; the "good parts version" is what remains after a loving father skipped the satire. None of that is true, and all of it is the novel.

Appearances

The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The "Good Parts" Version (1973) — William Goldman Goldman presents his novel as an abridgement of Morgenstern, with the boring bits cut

Editions in our world

The Princess Bride, William Goldman (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973) The "good parts version". There is no unabridged Morgenstern behind it. The real book is pretending to be an abridgement of a fictional one — the Joye of Snacks problem, run in reverse.

Connected volumes

Related to The Joye of Snacks · Discworld
Related to The Red Book of Westmarch · Middle-earth
Related to Jayaparajaya · Victory City
Related to The Blind Assassin · The Blind Assassin
Related to The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha · Don Quixote

Catalogue record

Category: Romance
World: The Princess Bride
Imagined by: William Goldman
Language: Florinese, in the alleged original
First appearance: The Princess Bride, 1973
Readability: Published in our world