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Beowulf's Grendel telling its side of the story. Is Grendel a ferocious monster, a mess-up child of a inattentive mother, or something else? Gardner has kept me confused. ( )
This parallel/companion novel to the legendary story of Beowulf is told from Grendel's perspective. Grendel is a monster who lives deep in a cave with his mother, whose precise nature is unclear, though she seems to be large, slow-moving and unable to communicate (in my head she looked something like a giant, monstrous larva, YMMV). Grendel one day ventures beyond the cave to hunt, at which time he encounters humans for the first time. He spends hours, days, years observing them, fascinated — but, you know, being a monster he's also hungry, so he frequently attacks and devours them as well.
The question I kept wondering throughout the book is what exactly is Grendel? He's certainly large and powerful with the ability to tear men limb from limb as easily as snapping a twig. However, he's also impulsive, overconfident and quite childlike at times. Every now and then we get a glimpse of a conscience. As a reader I wavered between sympathy (is it his fault he is the way he is?) and horror (so much violence and gore). The narrative occasionally wanders into philosophical territory, where I have to admit my eyes may have glazed over temporarily until the linear narrative resumed. I approached Grendel with a familiarity of Beowulf limited to what I had gleaned exclusively via cultural osmosis, so naturally I'm now significantly more curious to learn more about the original work. ( )
4.5/5 Having taught BEOWULF for a number of years to my sophomore honors, why didn't I have them read this, too? This book is not simply a retelling of BEOWULF from the monster's point of view; it is highly intellectual and philosophical as Grendel seeks to find some sort of meaning to his life. Drawn to and repulsed by humans, he reminds me of Frankenstein's creature, who also seeks the purpose to his existence. Several philosophies are explored here, most of which I can't wait to look into. The trope of reading a story from the supposed villain's point of view is not new, but it is absolutely heart-wrenching here. I dare anyone who reads this not to be touched by Grendel's utter isolation and loneliness. What a read. ( )
How do writers do it? Have thoughts so strange and put them in words so powerful? I read a book of Gardner's long ago (October Light) and thought it remarkable, but it was nothing like this. One short text to encompass human existence and meaning. Or was it just a story? ( )
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And if the Babe is born a Boy He's given to a Woman Old, Who nails him down upon a rock, Catches his shrieks in cups of gold. — William Blake
Dédicace
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For Joel and Lucy
Premiers mots
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The old ram stands looking over rockslides, stupidly triumphant.
Citations
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I touch the door with my fingertips and it bursts, for all its fire-forged bands—it jumps away like a terrified deer—and I plunge into the silent, hearth-lit hall with a laugh that I wouldn't much care to wake up to myself.
The sun walks mindlessly overhead, the shadows lengthen and shorten as if by plan.
And so begins the twelfth year of my idiotic war. The pain of it! The stupidity!
I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly—as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back.
What was he? The man had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and they, who knew the truth, remembered it his way—and so did I.
He closed his eyes, still smiling. "Pick an apocalypse, any apocalypse. A sea of black oil and dead things. No wind. No light. Nothing stirring, not even an ant, a spider. A silent universe. Such is the end of the flicker of time, the brief hot fuse of events and ideas set off, accidentally, and snuffed out, accidentally, by man. Not a real ending of course, nor even a beginning. Mere ripple in Time's stream."
“You improve them, my boy! Can't you see that yourself? You stimulate them! You make them think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are for as long as they last. You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which they learn to define themselves. The exile, captivity, death they shirk from—the blunt facts of their mortality, their abandonment—that's what you make them recognize, embrace! You are mankind, or man's condition: inseparable as the mountain-climber and the mountain.”
"I've never seen a live hero before. I thought they were only in poetry. Ah, ah, it must be a terrible burden, though, being a hero--glory reaper, harvester of monsters! Everybody always watching you, weighing you, seeing if you're still heroic. You know how it is--he he! Sooner or later the harvest virgin will make her mistake in the haystack." I laughed.
Something is coming, strange as spring. I am afraid.
Tedium is the worst pain.
Derniers mots
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'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.'
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