Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 don't like surfing? doesn't matter August 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I heard an interesting review on the radio for this book and thought I would give it a go. I was hooked from about page one. It isn't a story about surfing it is a story about risk, challenge and how life changes the people we are. A totally amazing read. I could not put it down.
 charlie don't surf August 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I couldn't care les abotu durfing and male bonding or coming of age, but I have to admit this book, like all the best is not really about what it says it's about on the cover. Deep down it's a study of male insecurities and the terrible alienation of modern man, craving the wilderness and extreme experience as a way to deal with his dislocation from nature. fascinating and insightful.
Breath July 31, 2008
I have just finished reading Breath and I thought it was a fantastic book despite the fact that it's got quite a male slant to it and I don't surf!
Elemental June 15, 2008
15 out of 16 found this review helpful
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.
"Could I do something gnarly, or was I just ordinary?" June 6, 2008
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
(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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