Winkie [Paperback]

Clifford Chase (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 10, 2007

In Cliff Chase’s scathingly funny and surprisingly humane debut novel, the zeitgeist assumes the form of a one-foot-tall ursine Everyman — a mild-mannered teddy bear named Winkie who finds himself on the wrong side of America’s war on terror. After suffering decades of neglect from the children who've forgotten him, Winkie summons the courage to take charge of his fate, and so he hops off the shelf, jumps out the window, and takes to the forest. But just as he is discovering the joys and wonders of mobility, Winkie gets trapped in the jaws of a society gone rabid with fear and paranoia. Having come upon the cabin of the mad professor who stole his beloved, Winkie is suddenly surrounded by the FBI, who instantly conclude that he is the evil mastermind behind dozens of terrorist attacks that have been traced to the forest. Terrified and confused, Winkie is brought to trial, where the prosecution attempts to seal the little bear’s fate by interviewing witnesses from the trials of Galileo, Socrates, John Scopes, and Oscar Wilde. Emotionally gripping and intellectually compelling,Winkieexposes the absurdities of our age and explores what it means to be human in an increasingly barbaric world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This debut novel from memoirist Chase (The Hurry-up Song) begins with the capture and wounding by a SWAT team of the eponymous, sentient teddy bear in a backwoods cabin; the team thinks it has captured a mad bomber. In jail, Winkie, who no one denies is a teddy bear, must contend with cruel jailers; his stuttering, court-appointed lawyer named Unwin; the 9,678 counts of everything from treason to witchcraft he's charged with; and the intersection of his life with that of the previous possessor of the cabin, an old humanities professor whose bombs never worked. While marking time, Winkie contemplates his past: his ownership by the Chase family, his loneliness when on a shelf , his magical awakening to life one morning—marked by a bowel movement so lovingly described that it recalls Bloom's in Ulysses. The sections devoted to Winkie's trial is a minor masterpiece of ridiculousness, in which the prosecution's move to end the trial after it has presented its side sounds uncomfortably close to what we read in the newspapers. This book is way too odd to be sentimental, and its political sensibility shuttles easily between the cartoonish and the shrewd. Chase puts himself in the same league as David Sedaris with this unclassifiable debut. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* With the recent controversy over domestic spying, the literary world is ripe for skewering America's unwieldy War on Terror--but good. In this wryly comic, paradoxically touching first novel, Chase delivers a cleverly original allegory on the absurdities of our terror-obsessed culture. After suffering years of neglect by children who have grown and moved on, a tattered teddy bear named Winkie miraculously discovers the power of movement and runs away to the forest to begin a new life. Unfortunately, this particular forest has been pigeonholed as the hideout for a notorious terrorist, and militant FBI agents quickly surround Winkie with drawn weapons and whirling helicopters. Unsure quite what to make of the diminutive quadruped--Is he a Middle-Eastern midget or a bizarre genetic experiment?--the authorities nevertheless trot out their standard interrogation techniques while charging the little bear with unparalleled barbarism. In the surrealistic courtroom circus that follows, Winkie faces a gauntlet of bizarre witnesses from the trials of Socrates, Galileo, and Oscar Wilde--an ordeal he endures by retreating into memories of the early years that nurtured his awakening. Inspired by a stuffed animal from his childhood (photographs of the bona fide Winkie are sprinkled throughout), Chase turns in a masterfully measured social critique featuring a protagonist as endearing as any from the classics of childhood literature. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (June 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802143105
• ISBN-13: 978-0802143105
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,152,236 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonder-ful, August 7, 2006

By 

Bruce E. Henderson "rhodasdad" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Winkie (Hardcover)

How anyone can call this book an "affront" is beyond me. Clifford Chase has taken the primal experiences of childhood and of our relationships with our toys and juxtaposed them brilliantly with a critique of contemporary political rhetoric and illogical juris-imprudence, invoking such "trials" as those in Lewis Carroll, Kafka, Abu Gharib, and Gitmo. Think The Velveteen Rabbit/Winnie the Pooh meets Conrad's The Secret Agent. This is a magnificent debut novel, as moving and bracing in its own way as Chase's memoir of his brother's death, The Hurry-Up Song.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Strange, yet fun, July 24, 2006

By 

Alan "GayFictionLover" (Ann Arbor, MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Winkie (Hardcover)

OK, imagine a book about a Teddy Bear. Got it? OK, now imagine a book about a Teddy Bear that comes alive. Picturing something like the Velveteen Rabbit? OK, now imagine a book about a living Teddy Bear who gets arrested by a swat team while hiding in a cabin in the woods after he's just buried the corpse of the cabin's former resident.

Huh?

Now imagine that the Bear is arrested for literally thousands of crimes including: several Unibomber-style mailbombs, corrupting the youth of Athens, holding to the false doctrine that the Earth revolves around the sun, terrorism, witchcraft, etc.

Weird? Yeah.

I've been attempting to explain this book to all sorts of people and I can't figure out a way to do it without making the book sound completely stupid -- which it isn't at all.

Instead it's a clever and cute and sorta touching satire/farce about our War On Terror ... um ... with a Teddy Bear named Winkie. But as strange as it all sounds, it is still a bit like that Velveteen Rabbit image you had in your mind a few sentences ago. In any event, regardless of how strange it sounds, it's a book that is funny enough to be one of those books that your partner annoyingly insists on reading aloud to you at night in bed while you're trying to read your own book and when he isn't reading aloud to you he's still chuckling to himself which makes you wonder what the heck he's laughing at.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars "Tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff...", December 26, 2006

By 

Akethan (Arlington, VA United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Winkie (Hardcover)

Why?

Re-hashing the hashed - this book holds a few magic moments which are just beaten to death and run flat by the meandering bizarre nature of this book. It's not just that someone's forgotten and unloved teddy comes to life and then is mistaken for a terrorist. It is the exhaustive details of a life half-lived. Of a little bear that comes to life for all the right reasons and a story that is almost beautiful - IN CONCEPT.

The entire run of - eating berries and taking a first dump, giving birth/a divine conception, the ridiculous clumsy mishandling of the initial story as it devolved painfully into mayhem and antics.

Why?

A few bonus points for Winkie's loopy attorney.

I fully agree with another reviewer about the urge to chuck this one across the room; and altough I have an old teddy bear that deserves a long overdue hug - by the end of the book, by way of Fargo, I craved a wood chipper scene for Winkie.