Readers and writers: In the realm of myth and magic
We’re in the realm of myth and magic today, with a novel based on the great epic Beowulf and a novella inspired by a Japanese folk tale. Both books have covers that are among the most beautiful of the season.
“Sister of Grendel”: by Susan Thurston (Calumet Editions, $18.99 paperback).
I want to save something sacred and dear within each of us, and especially within Grendel. But I do not make the leap toward a different outcome. All it would take is a simple turn of thought, in one breath. Something to make the murders end and reverse Beowulf’s fate, and pull from his reach the elevation of hero. Turn him into nothing but a visitor. Someone without a place in myth or legend. Definitely not a future king of the Geats with a name still remembered. — From “Sister of Grendel”
Susan Thurston, who lives in St. Paul, makes her fiction debut in this lush reimagining of the tale of Grendel, from the ancient epic Beowulf, by giving Grendel a sister, Rehsotis.
It isn’t necessary to know the story of how Grendel and his mother were killed by the hero Beowulf because this novel can be read as a beautifully written story, winner of a 2023 Midwest Independent Publishers Association award. But it helps if you do a little background reading before becoming absorbed in “Sister of Grendel,” set in a perfectly realized world of dreams and emotions.
In Beowulf, Grendel and his mother, Yenheth, are depicted as frightening monsters. Grendel hacks off his enemy’s limbs and heads and eats some of his victims. Rehsotis tells a different story, of a happy childhood in which she and her brother roamed their mother’s labyrinth. Grendel is not an ogre but a happy young man who soaks up knowledge and their mother is the tribe’s leader. They are members of the tall, strong tribe of Anathians, who possess language and live close to the spiritual world. Rehsotis, for instance, can inhabit the dreams of others so she can learn about their fears and joys. She also uses magic and she could have stopped the fight between her brother and Beowulf, but she didn’t.
The Anathians are peaceful and want only to be left alone. But they sometimes meet humans, who they call “smallheadeds.” After clashes and tribal wandering, Rehsotis is the last of her kind. Able to live for centuries, she sews herself into a water-proof sealskin sack and drifts in the ocean for years. She is taken in by monks and, later, lives in a convent.
Some of Thurston’s best writing is about Rehsotis and her lover Yargis, whom she meets in a monk’s dream and then in person. Descriptions of their love-making in the ocean are lyrical:
“..we turn together into the waves, falling deeper into the cove. His mouth covers mine and I am spread open, arms outstretched like wings, back arching, and Yargis enfolds me into his warmth. We drift deep into the water, spiral and grasp each other in a water dance. Now I am not cold. Not frightened. We do not need to breathe. We do not breathe. Instead, the water fills us with more desire for each other… Saltwater mixes us together. We turn into something else, another version of ourselves as liquid as the sea yet solid as marble… And there are the colors — colors that fill our minds. Red deepens to violet; yellow plumes open into emerald.”
Rehsotis has a child, who dies, and Yargis leaves her. (Not spoilers). Through the years she travels into villages filled with decaying victims of the Black Plague, watches her friends the monks reluctantly come under the growing control of the pope in Rome, and is horrified to learn how later generations depict her brother and mother.
The story ends on a hopeful note in 1931, when a young woman who Rehsotis rescued as a child holds the manuscript Grendel’s sister left for her to find.
“Grendel’s Sister” is published by an Edina-based company that specializes in publisher/author partnerships. Congrats to them for bringing out this novel, which would be a bestseller if it got the publicity given to authors from legacy publishers.
We can’t wait to watch Thurston’s writing career blossom.
“The Crane Husband”: Kelly Barnhill (Tordotcom Publishing, $19.99)
The crane had a broken wing, bound in a splint that looked as though it had been made from two bits of wood and strips torn from one of my mother’s shirts. It rested in a sling that had all the hallmarks of my mother’s careful construction — intricate stitch work and the occasional moment of surprising beauty. He attempted to wear shoes, like a man, but his clawed feet had already pierced through the leather and he scratched the floor with each clunk of his footsteps.
Award-winning Minneapolis writer Barnhill, recipient of the young adult Newbery award for “The Girl Who Drank the Moon,” author of the adult novel “When Women Were Dragons,” was inspired by an old Japanese folktale to tell this story of abuse disguised as love.
In the original tale, which has several versions, a poor man marries a woman who is a crane in disguise. She promises to weave beautiful tapestries but he must not watch her. Then he realizes she is a crane who is pulling out her feathers to create silk brocade fabric. In one telling the husband tells her to stop because she is becoming ill. In a version told to the 15-year-old narrator by her father before he died, the man becomes so greedy he pushes his wife to work harder and harder until she flies away.
Barnhill sets her contemporary story in a small Midwestern town where the narrator lives with her little brother Michael and her mother, a talented weaver but a flighty mom given to having overnight “guests.” It’s the girl’s job to manage the household, care for their goats, sell her mother’s weavings, and care for her little brother, all while fending off the social workers who want her in school.
The girl is astonished when her mother brings home a 6-foot crane with mean eyes and sharp, clawed feet, wearing a top hat.
Entirely focused on her love for the crane, the mother turns her back on her kids and spends hours in her barn studio working to create the masterpiece the crane demands. She ignores the scratches on the backs of her arms and a wound just above her ankle:
“She looked at me. Her eyes were strange to me then. Hollow. Empty. The cold dark between galaxies, or the dull ache of a barren, fruitless field. Looking back on it now, I recognize those eyes. I’ve seen those same eyes on different women in the years since — my girlfriends, my roommates, my coworkers. I saw them on a neighbor once, before I called the cops on her husband. I myself have had those eyes.”
The protagonist, whose voice is endearing, is tough and pragmatic. Sometimes she thinks she sees a man in the hallways at night, and when her mother screams in the barn, she doesn’t hesitate to do what she must. The price is her mother’s disappearance.
This is a story of abuse, family love, obsession and making of art. Some things transcend cultures and time, as Barnhill proves in this moving, sometimes-wry novella written in her usual graceful style.
