historical

While it can be accounted as the most repeated phrase throughout the book it is also my favorite. I was a little skeptical about reading the book since I had seen parts of the movie and found it stupid, but I was completely wrong. The book turned out to be a great adventure, full of hilarious characters with even more hilarious dialogue. And the movie does a great job at giving birth to the book even though the novel is still much better (that often happens with films based on books). I recommend this book (and movie) to anyone who is looking for something fresh to read (and see), it has everything "Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad Men. Good Men. Beautifulest Ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave Men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles....."

Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles. GREAT LITERATURE.

There's not a whole lot that's not in this novel. It succeeds at being maybe the funniest, most exciting, and satisfying stories yet written. Plus, the novel contains startling depth.

The writing of the novel is so superb. The prose is smooth and light. It is really conversational, and word-play abounds. The novel also (as the Amazon review pointed out) serves as a satire of adventure and fantasy novels of the past and comments on the differences between fantasy and reality. The structure of the novel (with the hilarious first chapter, the flashbacks, and the author-commentary) serves to frame those bits of insight Goldman is trying to get across. Consider the line "Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all." There's a lot in those words, and throughout the story, Goldman hammers home real truths about the nature of pain, death, and grief. And yet paradoxically, out of those truths The Princess Bride emerges as a story to give its reader reaffirmation in the greatness of life.

As you may can tell, The Princess Bride is my favorite novel. I've read it numerous times, and each time I read it, the book is better. I know that everybody watches the movie, and yes, the movie is great. Even a masterpiece. But the novel goes far beyond that. Read it.

A witty and elegant subversion of the fantasy genre.

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It astonishes me that some of the reviewers below never figured out that the book of which this one purports to be an abridgment /doesn't exist./ There never was an S Morgenstern, nor were there kingdoms of Florin and Guilder (the names of medieval coins, not countries.)

/The Princess Bride/ is a novel about the relationship between a sick boy and his grandfather. The grandfather emigrated to America as an adult. During the boy's confinement, the grandfather reads him their fictitious ancestral country's national novel, cutting and reworking as he goes to transform it into a straightforward adventure story the boy will enjoy. The problem of teaching a child born in America to identify with his national heritage is a difficult one; after all, people from the old country smell funny, eat weird things, talk with accents, and don't know anything about baseball. I imagine that Goldman himself comes from an immigrant family. In that light, this book is in part his response as an adult to his memories growing up, and it is warm and engaging.

But Goldman manages not to let this turn into treacle by combining it with an adventure story so good that they made a movie out of it. The scenes with Fred Savage in the movie are not extraneous, they're vital to the book's unique quality: naive self-consciousness. It's a book that's basically about someone reading a book (take that, postmodernism,) but it uses the metatextual conceit to add to the story by giving it a deeper social significance rather than to detract from it by making it the object of games with meaning. We accept both the realistic world of a boy coming to terms with his family and heritage, and the fantastic world of ROUSes, Holocaust Cloaks, and Humperdinck's life-suctioning machine.

You can read this book simply for the adventure story, which is what many people appear to have done, but in my opinion, there's a better novel written around the adventure story than in it. Whichever you prefer, I suppose.