“A fantastic book! It's a complex fable about art and truth which is written simply and is a very quick read. Grendel's reaction upon first hearing the old poet is amazing: it moves him to his core, presenting him with, as he sees it, two mutually exclusive alternatives: an ugly reality or a beautiful fiction. The question is at least as old as Plato's Republic: art is, in essence, a lie, but do we reject it on those grounds alone? Like Socrates, Grendel is unwilling to accept the paradox of art, i.e. that the lie lends meaning to the truth, that reality itself is a fiction of interpretation: our own interacting with the interpretations of others. It is this choice which is forced when paradox is rejected and to which the book's description of evil ("alternatives exclude") refers. That is also the difficulty of the Good: to believe in and be inspired by humanity's beautiful fictions while at the same time realizing that our own fiction (our 'Truth') is not the only one, that any interpretive framework for constructing 'the Truth' is nothing but a house of cards when confronted with 'truth'. Without art, artifice, ideology, and all mankind's other creative efforts, existence is nothing but a random assemblage of 'truths'. But without acknowledgment that our own beliefs and inspirations are built upon nothing but our own preferentially assembled, incomplete collection of 'truths', the 'Truth' that we create becomes coercive, excluding all alternatives within our minds and leading us, as with Grendel, to impose our 'Truth' upon others.”
“i got this book when i bought a box of random fiction books from the public library.i told myself that i was never gonna read it, but when i started, it turned out to be a pretty good story.this is beowulf, from the point of view of grendel. not bad.”
“My lit teacher made us read this... it's a decent story from an interesting perspective, but one of the most pointless books I've ever read.”
“just picked it up...read the first few pages or so last night...can already tell it will have an honored place in my library. can't wait.”
