The Night Listener: Armistead Maupin

                                                        

                The Night Listener was an easy read, in that I read it in less than a day. It was not an easy read in that there were a couple of parts that I had a very hard time with, content-wise. Being the prude that I am, I don’t find the goings on behind closed doors necessary or even beneficial to the plot or telling of a story, unless something happens during the intimate moment that is necessary for the story. The unnecessary bits, or the parts that I found unnecessary, seemed as if the author was pushing the point in a matter that was simply for shock value, to make sure that the reader knows that the author is gay and this is what some gay people do. I get it. It’s just private, and unnecessary to the story. Unnecessary to the point of drawing the reader away from the very weird and compelling mystery of the boy who is or is not there, the "Schrodinger’s Boy" (see Schrodinger’s Cat  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat ).

                The mystery in this fictional story is based on something very real and relatively recent, a head scratcher that demonstrates the chaos and confusion of what we consider “real”. Usually, the existence of a person is pretty apparent; a person either is a person or not a person.  What happens when people establish a caring relationship with a person that may not be who they think they are, and the existence of that person cannot be established as truth or fiction? It seems very important for the mystery to be solved.  Life is much more complicated than fiction; life doesn’t usually have a plot progression and a neat and tidy ending. Sometimes, life doesn’t provide an ending at all. For a work of fiction based on real events, The Night Listener is bubbling with different events of the author’s life. From personal relationships with parents and siblings and lovers, to a delicate “adoption” of a strange sick boy, this book is a stew of what it takes to be human in a very real and confusing social structure that captures nuances of aspects of life that I have never had experience of, and that make me grateful for the simplicity of mountain life. For bonus reading material, keep reading after the end of the story for the explanation of the mystery of the Schrodinger’s Boy.  See what you can make of it.

The Princess Bride: William Goldman (S. Morgenstern)

Many of us remember the star-studded 1987 film The Princess Bride with fond memories; the retelling of the childhood experience of the author as a boy (played by a young Fred Savage) with pneumonia, being read to by his grandfather( played by Peter Faulk), with the story being broken into occasionally by the boy telling his grandfather he is reading the story wrong because it isn’t following proper fantasy story plot rules.

  I recently came across the 1973 publication of the story and because of my fond memories decided I would not be a proper nerd if I didn’t read The Princess Bride when it crossed my path.  

                Written by William Goldman under the premise of an abridgement of the much earlier S. Morgenstern version that was read to Goldman as a child, the book is predictably different from the film, knowing what Hollywood string-pullers do to original text on a regular basis, but enough of the story was the same to give the reader a similar experience of enjoyment and nostalgia. The book is much more detailed, of course, with reflections on the author’s life leading to the desire to abridge the S. Morgenstern version of The Princess Bride to reflect the way his father (film/book difference) read it to him as a child after having realized his father skipped all of the ‘boring parts’, mostly about Florinese politics, countless pages of royal ceremony, packing and other brain-numbing details. The author’s voice is present at points of 'abridgment' where Goldman tells the reader why he chose to cut something, and what it was he was cutting. The truth is there was no S. Morgenstern, that every stroke of type in “The Princess Bride” from cover to cover is the fictional creation of the crafty, witty, and tricksy {ask Golem (Lord of the Rings), tricksy is a word} William Goldman. What a Hoot!

It was every bit as enjoyable to read as it was to watch the climbing of the Cliffs of Insanity, the epic sword battle of the Dread Pirate Roberts and the fencing Wizard Inigo Montoya, the fire-swamp-dwelling R.O.U.S., the pain-obsessed six-fingered Count, "to the pain!", "As you wish", the Brute Squad, and the unforgettable wit crossing between our heroic Pirate and the plotting Sicilian, Vizzini.

 I now love the book more than the movie, as long as I can keep Mandy Patinkin in mind when I read the line, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”