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Zusatztext PRAISE FOR THE PRINCESS BRIDE "[Goldman's] swashbuckling fable is nutball funny . . . A 'classic' medieval melodrama that sounds like all the Saturday serials you ever saw feverishly reworked by the Marx Brothers." -- Newsweek "One of the funniest, most original, and deeply moving novels I have read in a long time." -- Los Angeles Times Informationen zum Autor William Goldman (1931–2018) wrote books and movies for more than fifty years. He won two Academy Awards (for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men ), and three Lifetime Achievement Awards in screenwriting. Klappentext William Goldman's modern fantasy classic is a simple, exceptional story about quests?for riches, revenge, power, and, of course, true love?that's thrilling and timeless. Anyone who lived through the 1980s may find it impossible?inconceivable, even?to equate The Princess Bride with anything other than the sweet, celluloid romance of Westley and Buttercup, but the film is only a fraction of the ingenious storytelling you'll find in these pages. Rich in character and satire, the novel is set in 1941 and framed cleverly as an ?abridged? retelling of a centuries-old tale set in the fabled country of Florin that's home to ?Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passions.? Leseprobe ONE The Bride The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette. Annette worked in Paris for the Duke and Duchess de Guiche, and it did not escape the Duke’s notice that someone extraordinary was polishing the pewter. The Duke’s notice did not escape the notice of the Duchess either, who was not very beautiful and not very rich, but plenty smart. The Duchess set about studying Annette and shortly found her adversary’s tragic flaw. Chocolate. Armed now, the Duchess set to work. The Palace de Guiche turned into a candy castle. Everywhere you looked, bonbons. There were piles of chocolate-covered mints in the drawing rooms, baskets of chocolate-covered nougats in the parlors. Annette never had a chance. Inside a season, she went from delicate to whopping, and the Duke never glanced in her direction without sad bewilderment clouding his eyes. (Annette, it might be noted, seemed only cheerier throughout her enlargement. She eventually married the pastry chef and they both ate a lot until old age claimed them. Things, it might also be noted, did not fare so cheerily for the Duchess. The Duke, for reasons passing understanding, next became smitten with his very own mother-in-law, which caused the Duchess ulcers, only they didn’t have ulcers yet. More precisely, ulcers existed, people had them, but they weren’t called “ulcers.” The medical profession at that time called them “stomach pains” and felt the best cure was coffee dolloped with brandy twice a day until the pains subsided. The Duchess took her mixture faithfully, watching through the years as her husband and her mother blew kisses at each other behind her back. Not surprisingly, the Duchess’s grumpiness became legendary, as Voltaire has so ably chronicled. Except this was before Voltaire.) The year Buttercup turned ten, the most beautiful woman lived in Bengal, the daughter of a successful tea merchant. This girl’s name was Aluthra, and her skin was of a dusky perfection unseen in India for eighty years. (There have only been eleven perfect complexions in all of India since accurate accounting began.) Aluthra was nineteen the year the pox plague hit Bengal. The girl survived, even if her skin did not. When Buttercup was fifteen, Adela Terrell, of Sussex on the Thames, was easily the most beautiful creature. Adela wa...
