A book a day: Michael Winkler: Grimmish

I want to open the review with this quote from Mark Twain because, although in other places (if there are sites that have read and reviewed this book) they can say that it is, at least in part, a (false) novelbiographyessaychronicledocumentary, I think the best definition of Grimmish It is that of a postmodern artifact about PAIN.

Part #1: postmodern artifact. The review of the book itself is chapter 1 of the book (infinite loop, wow) and it already gives us a clue that what we are going to read is going to be, at the very least, peculiar. On subsequent pages, footnotes that include digressions, clarifications, quotes and reflections, medical or police reports, journalistic chronicles, surreal dialogues, breaking of the fourth wall, and of the “narrative logic” whatever, etc. confirm the peculiar character of the text. and they make it oscillate between the funny and the profound, between the realistic and the surreal, but keep the reader hooked to its pages.

Part #2: about PAIN. Yes, all of this to talk about physical and non-physical pain, our own pain and that of others, violence, our attitude towards it, and ways of understanding masculinity or not. Not only that; Other topics appear tangentially in the book, such as “Australianness”, the role of words, etc., but the epicenter of the text is, without a doubt, PAIN.

To do this, Winkler uses Joe Grim, a fourth-rate Italian-American boxer but with a superhuman resistance to pain and who was on tour in Australia back in 1908-1909, Uncle Michael (if that is his real name), a witness / companion of the pugilistic tourneé, and of the narrator/author himself.

Grim is a fascinating character, a guy who speaks like a wise man, who acts like a brute and who is a prophet of pain. His work makes the first pages slide into what seems like a biographical novel with boxing at its center, but Winkler starts the mixer, goes from right guard to left guard, plays with the limits of fiction, changes the heights of the hit, goes from the novelistic to the essayistic, from blood and action to the reflective, takes refuge in the ropes and ends up dismantling us with a torrential and surprising text that constitutes a surprise and a challenge for readers who seek strong emotions and texts that are located on the margins of literature.

P.S.: Grimmish It was a self-published book. Self-published people of the world: don’t lose hope