Breath: A Novel | Tim Winton | `I've bored people in bars and lost a marriage to silence.'

Breath: A Novel | Tim Winton | Tim Winton is my new favorite author

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Breath: A Novel

	Breath: A Novel Tim Winton Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 18 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Tim Winton is Australia?s best-loved novelist. His new work,Breath, is an extraordinary evocation of an adolescence spent resisting complacency, testing one?s limits against nature, finding like-minded souls, and discovering just how far one breath will take you. It?s a story of extremes?extreme sports and extreme emotions. On the wild, lonely coast of Western Australia, two thrillseeking and barely adolescent boys fall into the enigmatic thrall of veteran big-wave surfer Sando. Together they form an odd but elite trio. The grown man initiates the boys into a kind of Spartan ethos, a regimen of risk and challenge, where they test themselves in storm swells on remote and shark-infested reefs, pushing each other to the edges of endurance, courage, and sanity. But where is all this heading? Why is their mentor?s past such forbidden territory? And what can explain his American wife?s peculiar behavior? Venturing beyond all limits?in relationships, in physical challenge, and in sexual behavior?there is a point where oblivion is the only outcome. Full of Winton?s lyrical genius for conveying physical sensation, Breath is a rich and atmospheric coming-of-age tale from one of world literature?s finest storytellers.

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`I've bored people in bars and lost a marriage to silence.'

The novel opens with the middle-aged Bruce Pike, then a paramedic, attending the scene of a death that everyone else considers (or wants) to be a suicide. Bruce doesn't believe that it is and thus begins the body of the novel where Bruce recalls his youth (during the 1970s) in a conservative logging town near the coast in Western Australia. In less than 220 pages, Tim Winton creates the angst of growing up, of finding your own way when those around you seem to be lost and captures the beauty and cruelty of the natural world while sketching in characters who seem to be constantly searching the external world for what can surely only be an internal form of happiness.

Who you end up being and what you end up seeing depends a lot on where you've been. Bruce Pike (`Pikelet') and Ivan Loon (`Loonie') form a competitive type of friendship in the double digit years just before teenagehood. Their friendship is both enhanced and complicated by meeting up with Sando, an aging surfer, and his wife Eva. This is a novel about life, friendship, experimentation and regret. It is also about boundaries, risk-taking and (for some) survival.

Tim Winton is a great author. His fictional worlds can be uncomfortable and some readers will find aspects of this novel confronting as I did. Despite this (or perhaps because of this), I'm glad I read this novel and some of the imagery will remain with me for a very long time.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

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Tim Winton is my new favorite author

BREATH is a mesmerizing reverie about the meaning of courage - and life itself - that sucks the reader in from the first page to the last. This bittersweet coming of age story set on the wild coast of Western Australia follows two boys as they become obsessed with surfing and are both themselves compelled, as well as encouraged by their charismatic mentor, to pit themselves against ever more dangerous waves.

Deft, delicate characterizations set against a big country and its rugged people are vivid, but the scenes starring the whitewater monster waves sweep you into another realm altogether, whether you want to go there or not. Unforgettable.

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Beath

Engrossing and astonishingly real, in Tim Winton's Breath we find ourselves living in the rugged beauty of Australia in the 1970s, immersed in the mundane lives of two ordinary-striving-to-be-extraordinary young boys. Befriended by a surfing guru named Sandos, the self-absorbed free-spirit they come to idolize, the boys, one called Pikelet and the other Loonie test their limits. After "long days of chopping wood in the rain for days out in the long yard behind Riverside, amidst a wasteland of weeds and lines of washing, broken sofas and stone trough," the boys escape to surf. Pikelet narrates: "I will always remember my first wave . . . the way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing in air . . . I leant across the wall of upstanding water and the board came with me as though it was part of my body and mind. The blur of spray. The billion shards of light . . . I was intoxicated . . . I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living . . ."

Pikelet is a lonely introvert, drawn to the lure of the excitement, to pushing the boundaries of his skill and mental fortitude--to a point. Loonie is a wild child, insolent, discontent and distant, but wreckless. When Sandos chooses Loonie over the other to travel on a great but dangerous surfing adventure, Pikelet is left behind. Alone and forgotten, he connects with Sando's embittered and isolated wife, Eva, an extreme skier sidelined too early by an injury.

Pikelet and Eva embark on a journey of their own and without sympathy or sentiment, their relationship evolves to include another kind of game-in-the-extreme--one that's just as risky.

Winton has created a true coming of age tale in Breath, with descriptive narrative that gives life to the sea and the countryside with a skill so astounding one can feel the setting's pulse and powerful character--and the ever-looming threat of death. We find ourselves inside Pikelet's head led there by a story-telling skill so masterful we barely know it's happening. While some might wonder if Pikelet's boyhood encounter with Sandos and Eva is enough to explain his troubled adult life, Winton makes a most convincing case using words that capture the dangerous and fragile states of being that Pikelet, and those of us so like him, didn't know we possessed.

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Hauntingly beautiful

Bruce Pike, or Pikelet, now in his fifties looks back over his life and especially the years just prior to and through his early teens. He grew up in the 60s/70s in a small town near the South Australia coast, something of a loner until he meets Looney, a year older and with a lust for danger. They become mates and take to surfing. Sando, in his thirties married to an American woman, a surfer treated with a detached reverence by the other regular surfers takes the two boys under his wing; and Sando's home becomes open house to the two boys. But relationships between the boys, and Sando and his wife are not always what they seem, and there are some surprising developments.

Breath is a captivating story, beautifully told. The relative innocence and freedom of the period is well portrayed; for one thing what today would be made of a man in his thirties taking an interest in two boys, ten and eleven years old? Yet there is not the slightest hint of impropriety here in that particular respect. For a time the story seems locked into surfing and living on the edge for pure thrills; but then events take a different turn and it becomes very much a story of Pikelts coming of age.

In the last few pages Pikelet quickly take us through the rest of his life up to the present, and we become aware of the long term effects of his early life. Such is the power of the story that by this hard to believe that it is not autobiographical, with the consequence that it all the more moving, and reassuringly sad; however dissimilar our life may be from Pikelet's, we are bound to feel a connection, a common ground.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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