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Title: Breath: A Novel
ISBN: 0374116342
Author:
Tim Winton
Publicate Date: 2008-05-27
Publish: 2008-05-27
List Price: $23.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $15.64
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $13.50
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Keeps you holding your breath
Breath is a masterfully written tale of what it means to live in extremes; and since most of us, in our own ways, do, it's a tale about what it means to be alive. I'm ashamed to say that I only heard of Tim Winton when a blogger recently wrote that Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer's Quest to Find Zen on the Sea reminded him of Winton's surf literature. I am now very honored to be mentioned in his company.
A novelist with a voice no one could copy, Winton's ability to be colloquial while employing phrases and vocabulary that make literary geeks froth is both entertaining and incredible. It took me 30 pages to get into Breath's subtle flow, the off-handed remarks, the Australian slang. But the narrative picks up speed as it goes and once in I scarcely wanted to put the book down.
I especially enjoyed the first half when the main character and his fearless best friend Loonie are bathing in the sheer magic of water and, as they get older, the pastime that will obsess them the rest of their lives: surfing. Winton deftly captures what it is to be a wide-eyed little grommet enamored with the water life: with pushing the limits of breath retention, with unbelievable fact that humans can ride pulses of saltwater, with learning the endless complexities of how weather affects the sea.
As their mentor Sando, an extraordinary older surfer who seems most motivated by his fear of the ordinary, pushes the two teens to confront their fears in sharky and death-defying surf, you feel the magic of childhood innocence slipping sadly away. But with each wave conquered you do feel something new and mysterious gurgling to the surface, something not unlike like air bubbles that might burst prematurely at any moment. The fear that they will bust into oblivion is what keeps you hanging on Winton's every word - even through the novel's tougher parts.
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2: Powerful, moving, beautifully written. If not for the central event of the novel, this could have been such a good teen read
Middle-aged paramedic reflects back on experiences as 15-yr-old, when he and a friend are taken under the wing of an aging surfer and taught the skills and passion for extreme surfing. The older surfer's wife is an American ex-skier now felled by injury and her sexual seduction of the 15-yr-old is also part of his memories. The drive to surf for the sheer beauty, challenge, and thrill of it stands in stark contrast to the workaday world of the boy's family. He watches while his friend risks his life on the water and follows his mentor to foreign lands, adrift in the thrall of riding the biggest waves. Thrown from the board and tossed about underwater, they experience the asphyxiation necessary to avoid drowning. The impulse to breathe, and the impulse to stifle it, seem to stand in conflict on many levels in this intense coming of age story. The death that bookends the story, as the main character, now an adult paramedic, is called to the scene of a teenaged boy's apparent suicide by hanging, darkens the novel and limits its readership to adults.
Told with Winton's usual stark, inventive, and vivid prose.
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3: 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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4: `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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5: 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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