Grimmish , livre ebook

The book cover is yellow, with an off white rough border. It features an illustration of a meat grinder witha shirtless boxer standing on top. The title is printed in red and mimics meat coming out of the grinder. The author's name is written in a bold, black font across the top.
GRIMMISH
Whispers of Pain
Michael Winkler
GRIMMISH
224 pp. Toronto: Coach House Books
978 1 55245 466 4
I recently made a ponderously slow rereading of the preferred English version of the famous work written in Portuguese by Bernardo Soares, a heteronym of Fernando Pessoa. In one of his footnotes to The Book of Disquiet translator Richard Zenith provides an alternative translation for a phrase he has chosen to use in the text. The wording that appears in Zenith s English version of the book is thereby shoving it up against the wall. The alternative he offers is thereby letting it flow like a river, the slave of its own bed. The gap between these options is oceanic. The translator doubtless agonized over the best possible rendition of the original Portuguese, but what is the English-language reader left with? A pasty simulacra of whatever Soares/Pessoa intended. A whisper of a whisper of a whisper.
Pessoa s peculiar meisterwork is one of the disparate sources ransacked by Michael Winkler in Grimmish . A book ostensibly about the hapless Italian-American boxer Joe Grim s visit to Australia in 1908-09, Grimmish spirals into knottier regions including motivations behind the author s attraction to the Grim story, problems of fictionalized history, how a contemporary writer handles gap-riddled historical narratives, and most of all the rich realm of pain.
Overarching Winkler s peregrinations is the question of authenticity, and the impossibility that this presentation of Grim will bear much or any connection to the flesh-and-blood fighter Joe Grim. How pale is this simulacrum? How faint the whisper?
There is no narrative arc, close to zero love interest, skittish occasional action, incident rather than plot, and a narrator who is intermittently compelling but prevaricates and self-deludes like a broody prince at Elsinore. Winkler lards proceedings with asides that are intermittently useful and sometimes distracting. He revels in the construction of deliberately rickety storytelling structures, and enjoys a little too much the stunt of toppling his mouthpieces into knowingly unrealistic dialogue. Is anything profound said about Australia, or about manhood, or about individuals who choose a little- travelled path, and that ostensibly strange life choices can provide an existence as valid as any other? Yes, conceivably. Has the pain theme been wrung for every last drop? Probably, and possibly a few too many drops more.
It is not impossible that the formal conceit employed here, explicated by the author as an exploded non-fiction novel, may be a model that will repay further future exploration. Winkler wins points for his evident devotion to a narrow and seemingly unpromising strip of subject matter. He makes a convincing case for Grim as an exceptional creature, and the evocation of early twentieth-century pugilism is solid. The inclusion of extracts from contemporary newspaper accounts lends context and delivers some linguistic delights, although less tenacious readers may find they impede progress.
Whether a profitable balance between Grim s story, metafictional meddling, Winkler s ruminations on pain, and jocose and fanciful scads of fiction has been achieved is moot. The suspicion lurks that Winkler failed to unearth sufficient documentary material in the research phase to sustain a conventional non-fiction treatment, and his decision to ameliorate this shortfall with stylistic shenanigans will not be to every taste. Additionally, the sustained depiction of physical violence is likely to alienate some, while others may weary of the defiant wallowing in the sludge of masculinity. The grand total of female characters in Grimmish ? One.
Convinced of the artificiality of conventional fiction, Winkler knots himself tighter than a fishing fly attempting to find new ways to convey the Grim story. It is passing strange that the author seems to be commenting on the artificiality of the conventional novel at a time when storytelling, in all of its modalities, has never been more variegated and sophisticated. However, there are some novel touches, including the inclusion of a review at the beginning of the book, and the crazy paving of the narrative approach could be judged to make perfect sense (and/or appropriate non-sense) within the context of the subject matter. There is likely to be a readership, however small, that enjoys what Winkler is attempting to do, and finds within these covers something sincere and worthwhile. Sometimes it is a question of timing, the happenstance of the right reader meeting the right book at the right time.
In an era of post-post-modernism, when authenticity is regarded in some quarters as the only valid currency and in others as an irrelevancy, Winkler seems to be arguing for feelings above facts, as long as the feelings are his own. Hence, we are given several incursions through the fourth wall that beg to be parsed as radical authorial honesty, demystifying the process by which he has chosen to fictionalize the many parts of Grim s Australian adventure that are undocumented and must remain unknown. An alternative interpretation registers it as recursive self-indulgence bolstering the tendency to obfuscate, as if clarity itself was something from which to flee, as dangerous as the hooks and crosses of a heavyweight boxer.
More than a century after Grim left Australian shores, is it possible to frame his endeavours as heroic in their enactment of extreme physical humility? Can anything profound be drawn from an individual so singular, involved in activities so barbarous? Would any two biographical translations arrive at any agreement on who he was and what went on and why? Can we be comfortable that trying to account for Grim must always resolve into desperate whispering in shadows?
It is difficult to ascertain. Pessoa might have had an answer, even if Bernardo Soares did not. Perhaps it just comes down to the old joke: Two anarchists are making Molotov cocktails. One says, So mate, who do we throw them at? The other replies, What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?
GRIMMISH
MICHAEL WINKLER
COACH HOUSE BOOKS, TORONTO
Copyright Michael Winkler, 2023
Originally published by Puncher Wattmann in Australia, 2022
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Title: Grimmish / Michael Winkler.
Names: Winkler, Michael, 1966- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2023013291X | Canadiana (ebook) 20230132944 | ISBN 9781552454664 (softcover) | ISBN 9781770567658 ( EPUB ) | isbn 9781770567665 ( PDF ) Classification: LCC pr9619.4.w56 g75 2023 | DDC 823/.92-dc23
Grimmish is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 765 8 ( EPUB ), ISBN 978 1 77056 766 5 ( PDF )
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For Z, and for J
Nurse, where are we going?
- To the morgue.
But I haven t died yet.
- Well, we haven t arrived yet.
1 .
Red of slit eye. Red of slashed eyelid. Red of tongue sliced this way and that. Red of screaming echoes in cudgelled ears. Red of gashed nose. Red of welt and rent and tear. Red of broken gum and tooth and mouth. Red of leering gaping eyebrow. Red of flayed forehead. Red of intracranial bleeding. Red of torn nostril. Red of smacked cheek. Red of swollen jaw. Red of ripped lobe. Red the river from roaring red core spewing redly through red-slapped mouth. Red mask. Red veil. Red the abuse, abuse.
2 .
My uncle Michael was not in good health. This was not unexpected. He was not in fact my uncle, but my great-great or possibly great-great-great-great, and there was even wobbliness about whether he was a blood relative or just someone who had been around the place for so long he passed as family. I did not know his age, but he was exceptionally old. And now he was poorly, apparently.
His room reminded me always of the bow wake of an ocean liner. A narrow strip of worn carpet led from the door to the armchair where he sat, slept, surveyed. On either side were titanic walls of paper. Books, magazines, newspapers, letters. The mounds never seemed to slip or alter, but there was the ever-present threat that one day a manual on farm mechanics from 1927, say, might be knocked loose and then the whole shebang would shift and slide, a concatenation of paper movement ending with my uncle, who was probably not my uncle, ending his life submerged beneath his own paper history.
I closed the door behind me, closed out the bright day. Adjusted as always to the smell. Rotting paper, musty paper, paper more dust than paper. Well, he said, the dark wings are flapping today.
He always wanted to talk - endlessly, actually - which was why I avoided visiting, usually. But on this day he wanted to postpone the pleasure. Come back tomorrow, he said. That won t be easy, I said, trying to remember my schedule, remembering that it was blank, but not wanting to make this effort all over. I ve never told you about Grim, he said, and I need to prepare. I asked who or what that was. Joe Grim, he said. I m not the best today, and I ve got reading to do. You look him up, too. Get the gist, then come and see me tomorrow. Bring sherry.
3 .
I did as I was told. And found: singular, astounding Joe Grim, more forgotten than remembered. Joe Grim, pain artiste. Born Saverio Giannone on or about 16 March 1881 in Avellino, Campania, Italy. Migrated to the U.S.A. when he was ten. Worked as a shoeshine boy in Philadelphia, started frequenting boxing gyms as a sparring partner, then com