This is one of the few books I've managed to keep over the, maybe, twenty moves I've made since I left the home of my youth. My father was an English professor, and very much against television, so my siblings and I had story-readings every night till high school, and that meant lots of Shakespeare and other early English literature, Beowulf among them. Grendel is the retelling of that, the earliest story written in this language, from the perspective of the monster who, through no fault of his own, is caught up in the fate of the Danish warrior. From the view of the beast, ours is a world devoid of reason, controlled by fates and forces unimaginable, all weighed against this one lonely animal who just wants to snack on Danes and sleep on moss in a snug cave with his mom. When the spell of immortality he had come to rely on suddenly is lifted and his role in the story of Beowulf is at an end, his shock and bewilderment at fate's betrayal is truly heart-sickening, the way so many things are when they can't be put into words. Grendel did no wrong to earn his violent death, he was a monster and did as monsters do, but he was caught up in Beowulf's tale and for that he paid with his life. Beowulf's glory, from another perspective, is an outrageous and bewildering injustice. I read this story really young, and it was the first time I got the feeling that stories contained other, undeveloped stories, and that those stories might have different heroes and villains. And that maybe the heroes in one are not so civilized and noble in the other. I've had this copy for decades, and I'm pretty sure I bought it in one of those old used bookstores on Yonge Street that had shelves so full, they'd stack the paperbacks in towers in the corners and you could smell the foxy paper from the door.
This book has stuck with me since I was twenty something, and it still has some valence of those long days of thinking and seeking and making a world. I think that's worth keeping.
Score - +2 (5 saved, 3 released)
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteMy high school English teacher was in the final year of her doctorate program in English literature in 1993 when I was a student in her class. She was an amazing teacher who treated our undeveloped minds, as if our frontal cortices were fully developed. Our "final" required that we choose a book from our year of reading and write a college-level literature review. I chose Grendel. What was I thinking? I was thinking, "This book is really short." Wow. I will never forget writing that paper. I was quickly into the concepts of existentialism, the nature of being, and so on, and I confess, as a 17-year-old; I wasn't quite ready for that level of soul searching! Still, the book's haunting themes drew me to it, and I, like you, think that's something worth keeping. How I got an A+, I'll never know. I was so in over my head at that age!
ReplyDelete