Breath: A Novel by Tim Winton Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Breath: A Novel
Book Review: Breath- " It's funny, you don't think about breathing until it's all you think about.".
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a powerful coming of age tale set against a background of life in a small South Coast, West Australian town, surfing and a series of events that affect the rest of the young, 15 year old, Bruce Pike's life.
The novel commences with a middle aged Para Medic, Pike on the way to an emergency call, thinking of his younger colleague's disdain of him and then suddenly confronted with the apparent suicide of a teenage boy. The experienced Pike knows better and he reflects upon his own teenage years.
A paen to surfing, the story tells of the boy's love of thrill seeking, his learning to surf after seeing "grown men dancing upon the water", the relationships with family, with his young friend (Loonie)and an older role model (ex surfing champion) Sando, whose lonely wife eventually takes his interest from surfing to sex.
Pike's adulthood is not perfect but his earlier discussion with Sando, when he considered " there is nothing wrong with being ordinary" appears to be what he has achieved and is comfortable with.
You do not need to be interested in surfing to understand or enjoy this powerfull and disturbing novel. Winton's prose has the ability to bring both characters and the environment around them alive. An extraordinaly gifted writer whose stories linger in your mind long after reading is completed.
Book Review: Breathless am I after reading Breath
Summary: 5 Stars
Yesterday morning I finished reading Tim Winton's Breath and was fairly useless for the rest of the day as I rolled all of it over and over in my head like surf approaching the shore.
My first reaction was: Wow, finest kind. My next reaction was: but, in the end, there's no story because 3/4 of the novel is a story and last quarter is a rambling kind of closure. My third reaction was -- in the end, there is no end. And: who you start our to be might not be who you end up to be. Then, maybe there's salvation in ordinary that isn't available outside of the club. I'm still reacting but my current focus is the language in this book is nigh perfect and I like the focus on that.
Book Review: Don't forget Lockie Leonard
Summary: 5 Stars
I enjoyed Breath very much and wanted to bring the Lockie Leonard books by Tim Winton to your attention. Tim Winton wrote three Lockie Leonard novels for teenagers--coming of age novels about a kid who is almost 13 and into surfing. Adults shouldn't dismiss these--I think they are every bit as good as Breath. Start with "Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo". It is a fantastic read--it's not for the prudish, because it's quite frank in its sexual talk, which makes it really refreshing. I don't think an American parent or teacher would want any kid younger than 13 or 14 to read it. You can find cheap copies on Amazon or Alibris. Be sure to get Australian or UK editions of the books because book 2 anyway (Lockie Leonard, Scumbuster) was severely edited to change the Australian slang for the American reader. Big mistake which took all the colour out of the writing. The Aussie slang isn't that hard to figure out and it's a lot of the fun of reading the book. So, if you liked Breath, look for Lockie. (I have to say, however, that I would skip book 3 Lockie Leonard: Legend--its tone is relentlessly bleak and, in my opinion, it doesn't fit with the first two books.)Book Review: Elemental
Summary: 5 Stars
The West Australian coast can be raw, elemental. I was there in winter two years back, when there was a real tree-snapping gale blowing and the sea off Cape Naturaliste was a mass of churning white foam and wind-hurled spray, and an unfortunate American tourist was swept to his death from the rocks at Dunsborough.
It is this elemental world that is at the heart of Tim Winton's new novel Breath and it is about people fronting up to the elements in an attempt to free themselves from the drabness of their provincial lives.
The narrator is the nearly-50-year-old Brucie Pike. He is a paramedic and is called in one night to deal with an adolescent suicide, which he recognises is not a suicide at all, but a case of masturbatory auto-asphyxiation gone wrong. For reasons which emerge later on in the novel, this sad event spurs Pike into a recollection of his teen years, those years of coming of age when life is lived at its most intense, most meaningful but, in many ways, most ignorant and most painful.
And Breath is nothing if not intense. Pike's adolescent relationship with his fearless mate, Loonie, and their interaction with the non-conformist married couple Sando and Eva are at the heart of the 200-page story. These people push themselves to the edge, embracing fear, paradoxically, to overcome their fear, and in doing so, experiencing momentary transcendence - the adrenalin rush, the feeling of being purely alive. The boys, under Sando's tutelage, surf the most menacing waves they can find; Eva's rush comes from - or came from - extreme freestyle skiing.
And yet this elemental intensity - almost faultlessy depicted by Winton - is tempered, through Pike's eyes, by a profounder sense of reality. Loonie may be fearless - but he is emotionally blind; he could not be the narrator of the story. Sando is not as free-spirited as he first appears. Eva, after a bad skiing accident, is semi-crippled and embittered, existing out there on the edge, perversely so, as events in the novel later reveal.
So the surf may be pure white, but the undercurrents are dark and deep. Only Pike, in spite of everything, is a survivor - because he has one foot on the land, one foot in the water. It is only he, in a pivotal episode in the novel, who sees the futility of trying to surf the Nautilus - the extremest of extreme breakers - because it is not a real surfer's wave; it doesn't allow for the "pointless beauty" of riding the long waves in - the recognition of which suggests a kind of hard-won, precariously balanced maturity that none of the other protagonists, in this beautiful and richly-observed novel, manage to achieve.
Book Review: Hauntingly beautiful
Summary: 5 Stars
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.