Breath
|
List
Price: $14.00
Discount Price: $10.95
|
by
Tim Winton---------------------------
Winner of
the 2009 Miles Franklin Award
From
Publishers Weekly
This slender book
packs an emotional wallop. Two thrill-seeking boys,
Bruce and Loonie, are young teenagers in smalltown
Australia, circa the early 1970s. Their attraction is
focused on the water—ponds, rivers, the sea—but they do
little more than play around until they fall in with a
mysterious, older man named Sando. He recognizes their
daredevil wildness and takes it upon himself to teach
them to surf. As the boys become more skilled, their
exploits become more reckless; narrator Bruce (nicknamed
Pikelet) has doubts about where all this is heading,
while the aptly named Loonie wants only bigger and
bolder thrills.
This mix of doubt and
desire intensifies when the boys make a discovery about
their mentor's past.Surfing isn't the only dangerous
game in town. As Sando's attentions and favor flip-flop
from one boy to the other, the rivalry between the two,
present from the beginning, grows stronger and more
sinister. Sando's American wife, Eva, becomes more of a
presence, too. She walks with a limp, has plenty of
secrets of her own and becomes increasingly involved in
Pikelet's life, in ways that even a 15-year-old might
recognize as not entirely appropriate.
Winton's language, often
terse, never showy, hovers convincingly between a
teenager's inarticulateness and the staccato delivery of
a grown man: So there we were, this unlikely trio. A
select and peculiar club, a tiny circle of friends, a
cult, no less. Sando and his maniacal apprentices. The
language manages to summon up both the uncertain
teenager and the jaded adult: It transpired that I was
not, after all, immune to a dare, Pikelet tells us at
one point, with both the breathtaking unawareness of the
boy and the irony of the man.Told from the perspective
of the narrator's present life as a paramedic, Breath
aims to recapture a long-passed episode in a boy's life
and show how this shaped the man he grew into. The story
contemplates what it means to be less ordinary in an era
when extreme sports hadn't even been recognized. (The
fear of being ordinary is one of the terrors that drives
these daredevils to push themselves ever further.)
The author of 13 previous
books, Winton is well-known in Australia and should be
here. He touches upon important themes, of death, life,
breathing and its absence, while looking dispassionately
upon the relentless pursuit of thrills, pleasure, sex,
status: the mundane obsessions of the ordinary and
extraordinary alike.
David
Maine is the author of Fallen; The Book of
Samson; and, most recently, Monster, 1959.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of
Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Also available in
hardback
Tim Winton
accepts the Miles Franklin award
for Literature for 'Breath'
Watch and listen as Tim Winton
reads from 'Breath'
