Items related to Winkler
Winkler is bored, angry, anxious and full of the misery of his age. But in a sick world, in a hot city, at the end of history, at the very rim of the abyss, it might just be that Winkler is the hero we deserve. Winkler, whose days are sweated out in office drudgery, sexual frustration and a loveless relationship with a foul-mouthed Irishwoman who looks like a broad bean. He deserves so much more than these dull people and this dirty life. In fact, he really ought to do something about it. But what do you do?
A chance encounter with an elderly Polish Jew - whose life story is an old story, full of old horrors - fills Winkler's muddled head with a passion to act. One afternoon, walking home from work through an underpass, he witnesses a vicious assault on a blind girl and stops to help her.The next day, without any fuss, he pushes a fat woman under a train.
Now, as if by magic, he finds himself released from suffocating spiritual servitude. Within days, the new Winkler is revelling in a world of mood-enhancing pills, energizing powders and mind-expanding herbs, kinky sex, all-night parties and wild, meaningless friendships.It's all he's ever wanted.But it is brought to an abrupt end when he is humiliated at a village cricket match, suffers racial abuse, assaults a peer of the realm and is arrested for a terrible crime.
Winkler is a comic account of one man's search for meaning, identity and a suitable response to the burden of history. Coren's examination of the horrors of urban life and the lies we tell to survive is wild, dark, messy, frightening and brave.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review:
"A great howling aria of social and sexual frustration spurred on by the ghosts of Philip Roth's Portnoy and Martin Amis's Charles Highway of The Rachel Papers" (Daily Telegraph)
"Winkler is a fantastically funny novel... the book bubbles with inventiveness" (New Statesman)
"He inhabits the modern idiom with ease and his tussling with Jewishness, like Howard Jacobson's, is scabrous, irreverent yet never less than engaged and real" (The Times)
"A coruscatingly comic story of a man struggling to find identity and meaning amidst the horrors of urban life" (Observer)
From the Publisher:
"Winkler is a fantastically funny novel... the book bubbles with inventiveness" (New Statesman)
"He inhabits the modern idiom with ease and his tussling with Jewishness, like Howard Jacobson's, is scabrous, irreverent yet never less than engaged and real" (The Times)
"A coruscatingly comic story of a man struggling to find identity and meaning amidst the horrors of urban life" (Observer)
In this hilarious and thought-provoking debut, Giles Coren presents Winkler, an anti-hero for our cynical times.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherVintage
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 0099565080
- ISBN 13 9780099565086
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages448
- Rating
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