Breath: A Novel
by Tim Winton
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Book Summary Information
Author: Tim WintonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-05-27
ISBN: 0374116342
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of Breath: A Novel
Book Review: "Could I do something gnarly, or was I just ordinary?"
Summary: 5 Stars
(4.5 stars) When a middle-aged EMT arrives at the scene of a "suicide" by a seventeen-year-old who has hanged himself, he knows instinctively that this is an accident and not an intentional suicide--he recognizes the signs. Through flashbacks, the EMT, Brucie Pike ("Pikelet") relives his own teen years and coming-of-age on the west coast of Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. A lonely boy, he finds a companion in Ivan Loon ("Loonie"), with whom he shares a love of surfing, "something beautiful... pointless and elegant." But the beauty of surfing is far less important than its excitement and increasingly dangerous thrills. "We didn't know what endorphins were, but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and how addictive it became," Pikelet declares.
Tim Winton, Australia's best known and most prolific contemporary author, takes the reader along on a series of surfing challenges--life challenges for teenage Pikelet and Loonie. They practice by holding their breaths for extraordinarily long periods of time so that they can dive deep and survive the boiling surf if they are upended, and they force themselves to go the limit on every terrifying ride. Soon the boys become disciples of middle-aged Billy Sanderson ("Sando"), a surfing guru who fears nothing and who takes them to remote and more dangerous sites. "What we did and what we were after...was the extraordinary," Pikelet declares, and the "extraordinary," he believes, can be achieved only by facing fears and daring what no one else dares.
As time passes and the boys discover women, they extend their love of thrills into the sexual arena. An older woman with whom Pikelet has a relationship introduces him to her own need for exotic thrills, and Pikelet begins finally to question the relationship between excitement, thrills, risk, and death, and what maturity really means. Does being a mature man mean giving up thrills and choosing to be "ordinary"? Is "extraordinary" a relative term bestowed on one person by other people who value the same things? And how does one really become "extraordinary"?
In spare prose which uses some of the most vivid action verbs ever, Winton tells an exciting story which makes the seductive thrills of surfing comprehensible to the non-surfer. The characters clearly reveal themselves as humans--within the surfing milieu and within their private lives. Some grow in the course of the novel, and some do not. The life lessons which Winton articulates so clearly evolve from the action of this unusual plot, and when Brucie Pike reviews his life at age fifty-two, he finally puts his life as Pikelet-the-surfer into perspective. Tim Winton's western Australian coming-of-age novel is vastly different from The Catcher in the Rye and other such novels in terms of its setting, but not so different, after all, in the boys' discoveries of what makes men humans and what makes life worth living. n Mary Whipple
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