Michael Winkler’s Grimmish has been embraced by judges of the $60,000 prize – and by readers, whose support has been ‘truly astonishing’
guess I was sick of reading novels that all felt a little bit the same. I wanted to try to see if I could create something different.” Melbourne-based writer Michael Winkler and I are talking about his cult-hit Grimmish – a glorious, form-buster of a book that has earned praise from the likes of JM Coetzee and Helen Garner.
Winkler’s subject is the Italian-American boxer Joe Grim , a fin-de-siècle prize-fighter famed for his ability to withstand a battering. Lantern-jawed and relentless, Grim seldom won a bout but was nearly impossible to knock out. Known as “the human punching bag”, his matches were spectacles of brute endurance. A bone-crunching vaudeville.
Paradoxically, the qualities that make Grimmish so inventive – or as Presser would say, so “batshit bonkers” – stem from a desire to make the process of storytelling transparent. “I was trying to play radically fair with the reader,” Winkler says. “Not only to present a story, but to explain why the story was being presented the way it was – to own up when I was falling short, or trying to make myself look good.
It would be easy to turn the hapless Grim into a punchline – a thuggish jester – but Winkler treats the fighter with the wounded reverence we reserve for our fallen childhood heroes. As a boy, the author used to sketch designs for body armour, elaborate plating he could wear as protection. “It’s pretty obvious what was going on,” he reflects. “I found it too easy to have my feelings hurt.” Joe Grim was fantasy figure; a man seemingly impervious to pain.
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