/lit/ - Literature

Here's the one that changed my life. I read it while a senior in high school, and it led to my first full-blown existential crisis. The fallout from that pretty much defined the next few years, in my personal relationships, my education and early career choices, and even a bit of criminal history. For a long time I would cite Grendel as my favorite book, while at the same time experiencing what was essentially a bit of PTSD about it, due to the memories of how big a hole I'd dug for myself during those years.

It also led to an long interest in philosophy and an abiding one in great literature, so it's certainly not all bad. I still fucking love John Gardner in general.

This book is a work of genius and deserves more attention that it has received. It's true masterstroke is causing me to relate to and sympathize with an unredeemable monster. (Granted I'm not as hard up as Grendel, although the whole perpetual covid shutdown has edged me ever closer.) The innovation is that Grendel is not presented as a monster plain and simple, but a monster that was both born and made, cursed by inevitable fate to be an affront to nature. Damned to isolation, damned to be hated, Grendel embraces his nihilistic fate and leans into it with the full ferocity of his brutal frame.

For one thing Grendel is born under a bad sign. As the "descendant of Cain" he is cursed by accident of birth to be forever the enemy of humanity. His mother is an unintelligible, cold and capricious mass of fat and hair, at times coming to Grendel's rescue, at other times barely conscious of his existence, and above all unable to teach him anything.

As a child, Grendel explores the caves in which he was born, eventually discovering the outside world and eventually humans. In line with his wretched birth-fate, Grendel is cursed to be misunderstood by mankind. When he laughs, men mistake it for anger. When they first discover him, caught in a tree from a falling accident, they suspect that he is a malevolent tree spirit or a strange fungal growth. Only religious seers seem to be able to read Grendel's true nature. When Hrothgar loses patience and throws a handaxe at Grendel's helpless body, he yells "You're crazy! You're all insane!" But they take this for mindless beastial growls and shrieks.

Grendel watches from the shadows as mankind wages endless war against itself, pointless feud after pointless feud, both horrified and amused by the grotesque spectacle. He is enraged that men kill the livestock animals and burn the farms of their enemies rather than put it to use. Over time he sees Hrothgar consolidate his power, absorbing lesser chiefs and creating tributaries. Grendel decides to dedicate his life to destroying Hrothgar, not out of revenge for his attack against him as a child, but to stop what he sees as the growth of a cancer afflicting and overwhelming the brutal yet pure woodlands and countryside.

Grendel by John Gardner

It's a retelling of the book Beowulf but from Grendel's perspective. The book is ultra pessimism. I read it during a bad time in my life and it swallowed me whole.

The thing that got me was the inescapable constrains of life, the limitations of the self, and the perceptions of others.

It took years to detach myself from that book's thinking.

In this thread, post a book that you think is a masterpiece written by an author whose style you would never want to be associated with. Explain.

>Pic Related

For example: Grendel is brilliant, but I don't want Gardner's post-modern writing style to influence my work at all.