Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award Pain was Joe Grim’s self-expression, his livelihood and reason for being. He rarely won a fight, but in the early decades of the twentieth century Grim became a folk hero, distinguishing himself for his extraordinary ability to withstand physical punishment. In this wild and expansive novel Michael Winkler tells the story of Grim’s 1908–9 tour of Australia, bending genres and histories into a kaleidoscopic investigation of pain, masculinity, and narrative. The body in pain exists at the very limits of language. And yet Grimmish suggests that pain is also the most familiar and universal human condition – and, perhaps, the secret source of the human impulse to tell stories. By turns hilarious and tragic, vulnerable and tough, Grimmish is a truly a one of a kind – in the words of J. M. Coetzee, ‘the strangest book you are likely to read this year.’
