Grendel by John Gardner
My rating: 5/5 cats
this review may or may not contain spoilers. i assume that most bookish people are familiar with the basic plot elements of beowulf, either through high school required reading or that video-game-looking movie, or cocktails at the heaney’s. if not – this could ruin everything! but it won’t. ah, existentialism… when i was a young lass with my fontanelle as yet unfused; when i still liked the doors and books about manson, i dabbled briefly and emotionally in existentialism. l’enfer c’est les autres…it just sounds so good, doesn’t it? and not just because it is french and therefore inherently sexified. but it sounds so romantically world-weary and byronesque. and when you work retail, the surface of that statement rings true every single day. but at its core, it is of course infantile and selfish. and this book was where i first realized this. what i love about this book, beyond just the gorgeous simplicity of gardner’s prose (and, for some reason, the font) are its hidden depths. it isn’t just a retelling, it isn’t an apology or explanation – it does smooth out the rough warrior edges of beowulf (the work, not the character) and gives great powers of articulation to grendel with his almost genteel existential worldview, but there are subterranean caverns of philosophy tucked away in here. and i am not someone who digs on philosophy, but i do love the way it is explored here. there was some interview with gardner – must have been in the seventies, and someone was asking him about this book and “what it meeeeeeans,” and gardner just sighed and said “there are twelve chapters. there are twelve zodiac signs. you figure it out.” which is douchey, yes, but it makes me laugh. and, yes, of course there are the zodiac elements, and the nihilism of the dragon and so many other things happening in this tiny little book. but what stays with me, besides grendel’s whole “i alone exist, i create the universe blink by blink” speech, is of course poor existential grendel losing his comfortable childish worldview and “growing up” as he is beaten with his own arm (why are you hitting yourself??) and being shouted at. “sing of walls, bitches!!” there are of course other stages of development at work here, but the one that affected me most powerfully at 17 was this renunciation of existentialism. i think it marked my entrance into womanhood, and it had nothing to do with menarche or penetration or tax forms. for me, the adult world became mine when i set aside childish things unexpectedly (and incompletely) in the wake of a monster’s arm. grendel’s had an accident. so may you all.
