"William Goldman - The Princess Bride" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldman William)

English is his own. He spoke eight tongues." Here my father put down the book and held up
all his fingers." Eight . Once, in Florin City, I was in his cafe." He shook his head now; he was
always doing that, my father, shaking his head when he'd said it wrong. "Not his cafe. He
was in it, me too, the same time. I saw him. S. Morgenstern. He had head like this, that big,"
and he shaped his hands like a big balloon. "Great man in Florin City. Not so much in
America."
"Has it got any sports in it?"
"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."
"Sounds okay," I said, and I kind of closed my eyes. "I'll do my best to stay awake . . .
but I'm awful sleepy, Daddy. . . ."
Who can know when his world is going to change? Who can tell before it happens, that
every prior experience, all the years, were a preparation for . . . nothing. Picture this now: an
all-but-illiterate old man struggling with an enemy tongue, an all-but-exhausted young boy
fighting against sleep. And nothing between them but the words of another alien, painfully
translated from native sounds to foreign. Who could suspect that in the morning a different
child would wake? I remember, for myself, only trying to beat back fatigue. Even a week later
I was not aware of what had begun that night, the doors that were slamming shut while
others slid into the clear. Perhaps I should have at least known something, but maybe not;
who can sense revelation in the wind?
What happened was just this: I got hooked on the story.
For the first time in my life, I became actively interested in a book . Me the sports
fanatic, me the game freak, me the only ten-year-old in Illinois with a hate on for the alphabet
wanted to know what happened next .
What became of beautiful Buttercup and poor Westley and Inigo, the greatest
swordsman in the history of the world? And how really strong was Fezzik and were there
limits to the cruelty of Vizzini, the devil Sicilian?
Each night my father read to me, chapter by chapter, always fighting to sound the words
properly, to nail down the sense. And I lay there, eyes kind of closed, my body slowly
beginning the long flow back to strength. It took, as I said, probably a month, and in that time
he read The Princess Bride twice to me. Even when I was able to read myself, this book
remained his. I would never have dreamed of opening it. I wanted his voice, his sounds.
Later, years later even, sometimes I might say, "How about the duel on the cliff with Inigo
and the man in black?" and my father would gruff and grumble and get the book and lick his
thumb, turning pages till the mighty battle began. I loved that. Even today, that's how I
summon back my father when the need arises. Slumped and squinting and halting over
words, giving me Morgenstern's masterpiece as best he could. The Princess Bride
belonged to my father.
Everything else was mine.
There wasn't an adventure story anywhere that was safe from me. "Come on," I would
say to Miss Roginski when I was well again. "Stevenson, you keep saying Stevenson, I've
finished Stevenson, who now?" and she would say, "Well, try Scott, see how you like him, "
so I fried old Sir Walter and I liked him well enough to butt through a half-dozen books in
December (a lot of that was Christmas vacation when I didn't have to interrupt my reading
for anything but now and then a little food). "Who else, who else?" "Cooper maybe," she'd
say, so off I went into The Deerslayer and all the Leatherstocking stuff, and then on my own
one day I stumbled onto Dumas and D'Artagnan and that got me through most of February,
those guys. "You have become, before my very eyes, a novel-holic," Miss Roginski said.