Usually I really enjoy a coming of age story but Winton's character never really grabbed a hold of me in ways that made me care about them. I will probably take a look at some of his other books just out of curiousity though. ( )

What a disappointment! Winton is clearly a great writer, and the initial chapters on Australian surf culture are very clever & engaging. However, after that it seems like Winton doesn't know how to end the novel, so he throws in a few pornographic scenes and tapers it all off into a depressing & mediocre ending. Not recommended for teens under 18. Strong disturbing sexual themes (including auto-asphyxiation resulting twice in death). ( )

This short, highly readable, remarkably complex novel is a worthy winner of the Franklin Award. Is it about ordinariness contrasted with high risk-taking and the rewards of either? Are there extreme risks with being ordinary, just as there are with its oposite? Pikelet the narrator turns out to be the most ordinary of the four main characters but his life is unsatisfying. Loonie his friend and extreme risk taker ends up dead. Sando the mysterious surfing guru is also a high risk taker but apparently ends well, while injured Eva his wife is also at the high risk end but draws sexual adventurism from Pikelet against both their better judgment.
An excellent piece of work. Don't miss it. ( )

Many would think this novel is a coming-of-age story. It is, all about the growing up, together and apart of Bruce Pike (Pikelet) and Ivan Loon (Loonie). But it is more about their daring one another to face danger, possibly death, through the fear that chills their flesh, bones and resolve. About competing against each other and against themselves.
Breath is Bruce's story, his life on his terms, even when both his friend Loonie and his mentor (Sando) and his lover (Eva) push him further and further. The book's story is set on a lonely Australian coast and told with captivating descriptions of the inhabitants, the major characters, the land, the ocean and most vividly the weather, swells, waves and thunderous experiences around surfing.
The only rough edges in the book are the transitions between beginning in adulthood, that action, delving into Pikelt's youth and growing by recall and the subsequent return to adulthood. They tie together but only loosely.

I've been thinking about the enigma of respiration as long as I can remember," says the narrator of Tim Winton's deservedly award-winning novel, BREATH.

Bruce Pike, a man with a complicated past full of addiction and regret, recalls for us his adolescence in Western Australia during the 1970s, when he was known as "Pikelet." He and his friend Loonie live in Sawyer, a small town of "millers and loggers and dairy farmers." Loonie lives in a motel, with his damaged and damaging family, and seems to exist solely to take risks, daring others to dare him into more and more dangerous stunts,

Although their parents have forbidden them to surf, rightfully thinking it's too bloody dangerous, the boys can't resist, and one day they spot a much older solitary surfer riding the waves with "his head thrown back as if he'd just finished singing an anthem that nobody else could hear." And so we meet 36-year-old Sando, a "huge, bearded, coiled-up presence a man with his own mysterious past, and shortly thereafter Eva, his wife. Eva is irritable, chilly, and suffers from a leg horribly damaged in an aerial skiing accident. .

"I've wondered whether the life-threatening high jinks that Loonie and I and Sando and Eva got up to in the years of my adolescence were anything more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath. It's easy for an old man to look back and see the obvious, how wasted youth and health and safety are on the young who spurn such things, to be dismayed by the risks you took, but as a youth you do sense that life renders you powerless by dragging you back to it, breath upon breath upon breath in an endless capitulation to biological routine, and that the human will to control is as much about asserting power over your own body as exercising it on others."

And thus are the themes of thanatos, of sex and death are laid out for the reader. One of the many things at which Tim Winton excels is the ability to create a sensual thematic pattern. Breath, holding it, losing it, depriving others of it ... waiting, drowning, strangulation, even those dangerously silly games young people play, whirling about and holding their breath until they faint... each aspect of the air in the lung is unraveled like a string of bubbles throughout the novel. That in and of itself makes it a pleasure to read, and that would be enough, but Winton's descriptions, not to mention his perfectly-drawn psychological portraits are simply fabulous.

I admit there was a moment in BREATH when I thought things had gone off the rails a bit. Pikelet has a girlfriend named Queenie, and she is so much on the periphery of the story that, knowing how obsessed boys at that age are with girls, it lacked credibility. However, just when I thought......

TO READ THE REST OF THE REVIEW, PLEASE GO TO:
http://inpraiseofbooks.blogspot.com/2... ( )