Customer Reviews

Winkie

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

For the first third of this book, I gave it a 3. By the middle third it was a 4, and by the time I finished it was a 5. Winkie is a memorable and loveable character. The book is filled with creativity. I didn't find it achingly funny as the book jacket suggested, but it most definitely was surprisingly moving.

Part of what I didn't love about the start of this book was that it read like a memoir and I wasn't in the mood for a memoir, however, it absolutely played into the psychology of Winkie and was critical to the story.

It was magical and wonderful and half way through compelled me to pull out my worn, torn and re-sewn Paddington Bear and give him a long overdue well-deserved hug.

Nicole Del Sesto, Author All Encompassing Trip

Winkie is an incisive satire of the politics and psychology of scapegoating -- and it's also a sensitive, brave evocation of childhood abjection. Winkie (the bear) is a brilliant invention, a liminal narrator, and unforgettable character. Winkie (the novel) is a breath of fresh air in fiction, an act of defiance,a children's tale for adults -- and a book I did not want to put down.

Winkie is a loveable hero--an "Everybear" in the face of the fears of post 911 America. Relevent, thoughtful,funny, bordering on the truly absurd, the tale is a sweet read with laugh-out-loud moments.

Responding to this book is no small feat, because there's so much going on. Some of it is excellent, and some of it is awful. The finished book is a big literary casserole in which the good and the bad are mushed together into a product which is memorable but strangely unsatisfying.

The frame story is that Winkie is a teddy bear who has, through his own means, developed the ability to move about, and built his own life. At the beginning of the book, he lives alone in a cabin in the woods, lonely and bereaved. All of a sudden he is arrested by a small army of law enforcement agents for reasons he can't really understand and walked through a Kafka-esque hell of American jurisprudence.

That's the frame story. But the real beating heart of this book lives in three reminiscences. Trapped and knowing his time may be over, Winkie goes over his life, trying to figure how it might have been different. He remembers his first owner and his last owner, and the days each of them stopped loving him. These parts of the book are remarkably affecting, and I actually cried while reading these reminiscences--something I haven't done over a book in over ten years.

In the third reminiscence, Winkie relives the discovery of his ability to move. His new form of life is the product of a previous existence of such extreme isolation and boredom that he could qualify as a new Sartre. But this makes him a new being, with an entirely new relationship to the universe, a man/woman with his own cub and a life of his own making, a life that the human world is unwilling to leave alone.

But as smart and moving as these memories are, the frame story undermines this with a barrage of trivial twaddle so bad it almost made me throw the book aside unfinished. Suspected of violations of the Homeland Security Act, Winkie suddenly finds himself in court, accused of every significant crime in Western history, including consorting with Witches, the sexual quirks of Oscar Wilde, and even the transgressions of Socrates as related by Plato. I gather this barrage is supposed to be funny and satirical, but it comes across as merely sloppy.

I can't figure why a book that at some points is so touching would, at other times, try so hard to sneak up behind itself and kick its own butt. Perhaps the author thought the camp humor of the frame story would make the memories more poignant. Unfortunately, it feels like the author doesn't trust the audience and thinks he needs to hold up a big sign to let us know he's making fun of President Bush and the HSA. So let me say, Clifford, one writer to another: if we can get the existential merits of the discursions, we can certainly grasp more subtle mockery of current events without having it smacked in our faces.

If you can pick through the parts of the book that fail, the parts that succeed are definitely worth it. Some of this book may be the most moving content you read in quite a while. But other parts of this book are flabby, histrionic, and uninteresting. It's up to you which is worth more to you and your limited reading time.

I picked a good time to read this book because I saw exactly what (I think) Cliff Chase was showing us being done on television with the whole JonBenet killer. In order to feed the media and satisfy the public, all laws are thrown aside, trial procedure is completely tossed out the window and common sense utterly annihilated in order to try a teddy bear for terrorism (which is where I was going with the killer comparison). No one stops to say Winkie is just a teddy bear. Aside from the trial parts, I enjoyed the reflections of a much loved toy that has been cast aside. It made me look twice at my own care bear, leftover from childhood. I'm glad I kept it around and my daughter snuggles it so it won't have to jump out the window! :) This is an excellent book, but you really shouldn't approach it with any preconceived ideas.

I ordered Winkie after reading a glowing review on the Kirkus website. I thought the premise was very interesting and gave potential to a great parody on the "war on terror". The review also suggested this would be a very good book. After reading it I have come to the conclusion that this is among the most overrated books of the last year. It seems like everything, including the kitchen sink, was thrown into the book and the editing more or less forgotten. There are good aspects to this book, hidden in between chapters that could have been good with more editing and work (courtroom for instance) and other chapters wich add little or nothing more than nuisance to the book (overlong chapters about Winkie's past with the family). This could have been a good book but sadly isn't. There is potential there and some good chapters but not enough.

I don't understand the hype. I finished the novel, but I can't think of one point that I felt compelled to keep reading. I just sort of picked at it until it ended.

"Winkie" reminds me of David Foster Wallace's "The Broom of the System": an early effort by a great writer that sound more interesting when you explain the plot than when you actually read it--full of great moments that never quite fulfill their initial promise.

Still, there is much to admire. The bits that are good are transcendent. However, you have to wade though a bunch of half-formed and unfinished stuff to get there.

I suggest you read the book, but cut the hype by half before you start. The good bits will leave your breathless; the rest is just the price you pay to experience genius in vitro.