Next Up – a deep Breath for Tim Winton
Breath by Tim Winton – 2009 – paperback – 276 pages – $21.51 from Fishpond.com.au
For all those feminines who couldn’t make it to our first book club meeting, we missed you but we had a good night meeting each other and discussing “Home” by Marilynne Robinson.
Lindy gave a very enthusiastic summary of the book which then brought us to considering what ‘home’ means to each of us – was it somewhere to escape, a haven where one could return, or was home where we found love/friends/acceptance?
Is it a geographical place or a state of being?
At this stage, I had had too much champagne (as I was the only one drinking it) and became animated discussing I don’t know what!
All this was helped along by a cosy fire, extra spicy wasabi peas, tea, and a splash of wine here and there 
(A special mention to Rachael at this point for sticking to her guns during Dry July. Well done Rache!)
It was a fun night and Lindy and I sat talking in front of the fire for another hour about the novel after everyone had left. We both were touched by the same passage of beautiful Robinsonian prose where Glory is cutting her aged father’s hair:
“His hair…was so fine, so white and weightless, that it eddied into soft curls…The nape of his neck, the backs of his ears. The visible strain of holding the great human head upright for decades and decades…At the end of so much effort, the neck seemed frail, but the head was still lifted up, and the ears stood there, shaped for attention, soft as they were. She’d have left all that lovely hair, which looked like gentle bewilderment, just as the lifted head and the ears looked like waiting grown old, like trust grown old.” (p.169)
Upon finishing Home, we all decided at the end of the evening that our next book should be Breath by Tim Winton – yes, we may have a fondness for the single word/single syllable title, but this is a total change of literary style.
Winton’s prose is raw, gritty and simplistic. He’s Australian, and when it comes to writing he doesn’t mess around.
Here is a short plot description from The First Tuesday Book Club of Breath:
From the safety of many years now passed, Bruce Pike reminisces about his adolescence and competitive friendships with Loonie, Sando and Eva, who all shared a troubling lust for excitement and danger.
‘Pikelet’, as he is known to his friends, is the only child of over-protective parents. From his small hometown, he can hear the ocean and its beauty and power draws him close. Spurning their parent’s rules that forbid them from the beach, Pikelet and Loonie make the arduous journey to the coast. Desperate to master the pounding waves, the two boys fall under the tutelage of Sando, a mysterious older surfer. Along with Sando’s young American wife, they embark on increasingly risky experiences with unimaginable outcomes and effects that will reverberate for many years after.
Winton has (again, for the 4th time) won the Miles Franklin Award for this novel and it’s being heralded as his best so far.
I’m so keen that I’ve already gone out and bought the book – it’s $27.50 from Borders and is one of the books available in their “3 for the price of 2? offer. If, however, you’d rather do the right thing and support your local independent book seller, seeing as how this book has been out for a while and has won heaps of awards, you should be able to throw a dart with a blindfold on and safely hit a copy of this book.
Breath was awarded the Surf Culture Award at the 2009 Australian Surfing Awards.
By clicking on the little widget below you can listen to Tim Winton discuss Breath and his general conservationist do-good-ery with Philip Adams from Late Night Live on ABC Radio National back in May of 2008 – note Adams’ prescience with regard to the Miles Franklin.
Here is Tim Winton graciously accepting the 2009 Miles Franklin Award from his home in WA in which he also has a go at the Productivity Commission’s proposed scrapping of the Australian Copyright Restrictions. Semi Literati examines the true cost of cheaper books if you’re interested:
And here is a rather ponderous little piece about Breath featuring extracts and the author interviewed (6mins 16secs):
Tim Winton reads from ‘Breath’ from Virginia Murdoch on Vimeo.
Femi Literate will next meet on Thursday 3rd September at Lindy and Jo’s house again from 7.30-10.00pm.
Tags: australian authors, book of the b-month, fiction, tim winton
We were outnumbered x5 by the antipasto kebabs and had enough wine for a small army but the kitchen bar at Lindy and Jo’s was able to support our little group of 4 (and the kebabs) when we gathered to discuss Tim Winton’s Breath.
Rachel had read it in a day and had found it, as is often the case with Winton, strange and addictive. We all found his writing to have a quality of lyrical bluntness which was beautiful but unsettling. But did we relate with his characters of Sando, Eva, Pikey..? ?
We could identify with wanting to push ourselves to a place of really living but I found the character’s outlook so bleak. But I guess that’s what makes Winton so Winton. Ali enjoyed reading about the experience of surfing, as if she were almost riding the wave herself, and it reminded her that she is going to learn to surf one day
What was there to take away from Breath?
I was feeling there might be no message of hope but Lindy reminded us that Winton was trying to comment on truly living and also when one might step over the boundary into the bondage of always wanting more. Hmmm…
So is Winton’s theme contentment?
All I know for sure is that by the end of the night, the kebabs were all gone, along with the strawberries, blueberries and wine – and I was very content