Breath

by Tim Winton

Overview

A story of risk and learning one’s limits by challenging death—now a major motion picture starring Simon Baker, Elizabeth Debicki, and Richard Roxburgh.

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

On the wild, lonely coast of Western Australia, two thrill-seeking teenage boys fall under the spell of a veteran big-wave surfer named Sando. Their mentor urges them into a regiment of danger and challenge, and the boys test themselves and each other on storm swells and over shark-haunted reefs. The boys give no thought to what they could lose, or to the demons that drive their mentor on into ever-greater danger. Venturing beyond all caution—in sports, relationships, and sex—each character approaches a point from which none of them will return undamaged.

“Stunning in the depth of its audacity . . . limitlessly beautiful prose.” —The Washington Post Book World

“A tender, incisive, sometimes brutal, and always moving coming-of-age novel . . . The prose is always astonishing, the descriptions of sea and weather especially vivid . . . The book seems as simple, and as vital, as the act of breathing itself.” —The Seattle Times

“Darkly exhilarating . . . a tautly gorgeous meditation on the inescapable human addiction to the monotony of drawing breath, ‘whether you want to or not.’” —The New York Times Book Review

“A coming-of-age novel written with Tim Winton’s customary tenderness and vivid sense of place and psychological truth . . . This is his most forceful and perfect novel to date.” —Colm Tóibín, New York Times–bestselling author

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429901246
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/01/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	228
Sales rank:	707,014
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Tim Winton is widely considered one of the greatest living Australian writers. He has published numerous books, and his work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Since his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian/Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music, and Breath) and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music). He lives in Western Australia.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt
We come sweeping up the tree-lined boulevard with siren and lights and when the GPS urges us to make the next left we take it so fast that all the gear slams and sways inside the vehicle. I don’t say a thing. Down the dark suburban street I can see the house lit like a cruise ship.
Got it, she says before I can point it out.
Feel free to slow down.
Making you nervous, Bruce?
Something like that, I murmur.
But the fact is I feel brilliant. This is when I feel good, when the nerve-ends are singing, the gut tight with anticipation. It’s been a long, slow shift and there’s never been any love lost between Jodie and me. At handover I walked up on a conversation I wasn’t supposed to hear. But that was hours ago. Now I’m alert and tingly with dread. Bring it on.
At the call address Jodie kills the siren and wheels around to reverse up the steep drive. She’s amped, I guess, and a bit puffed up with a sense of her own competence. Not a bad kid, just green. She doesn’t know it but I’ve got daughters her age.
When she hits the handbrake and calls in our arrival at the job I jump out and rip the side door back to grab the resus kit. Beneath the porch steps on the dewy grass is a middle-aged bloke hugging himself in silence and I can see in a moment that although he’s probably done his collarbone he’s not our man. So I leave him to Jodie and go on up to announce myself in the open doorway.
In the livingroom two teenage girls hunch at opposite ends of a leather couch.
Upstairs? I ask.
One of them points without even lifting her head, and already I know that this job’s become a pack and carry. Usually they see the uniform and light up with hope, but neither of them gives me as much as a glance.
The bedroom in question isn’t hard to fi nd. A little mat of vomit in the hall. Splinters of wood. I step over the broken-down door and see the mother at the bed where the boy is laid out, and as I quietly introduce myself I take it all in. The room smells of pot and urine and disinfectant and it’s clear that she’s cut him down and dressed him and tidied everything up.
I slip in beside her and do the business but the kid’s been gone a while. He looks about seventeen. There are ligature marks on his neck and older bruises around them. Even while I’m going through the motions she strokes the boy’s dark, curly hair. A nice-looking kid. She’s washed him. He smells of Pears soap and freshly laundered clothes. I ask for her name and for her son’s, and she tells me that she’s June and the boy’s name is Aaron.
I’m sorry, June, I murmur, but he’s passed away.
I know that.
You found him a while ago. Before you called.
She says nothing.
June, I’m not the police.
They’re already on their way.
Can I open the wardrobe? I ask as Jodie steps into the
doorway.
I’d prefer that you didn’t, says June.
Okay. But you know that the police will.
Do they have to?
The mother looks at me properly for the fi rst time. She’s a handsome woman in her forties with short, dark hair and arty pendant earrings, and I can imagine that an hour ago, when her lipstick and her life were still intact, she’d have been erect and confident, even a little haughty.
It’s their job, June.
You seem to have made some kind of . . . assumption.
June, I say, glancing up at Jodie. Let’s just say I’ve seen a few things in my time. Honestly, I couldn’t begin to tell you.
Then you’ll tell me how this happened, why he’s done this to himself.
I’ve called for another car, says Jodie.
Yeah, good, I mutter. June, this is Jodie. She’s my partner tonight.
Go ahead and tell me why.
Because your husband’s broken his collarbone, says Jodie. He broke down the door here, right?
So what do I tell them? the mother asks, ignoring Jodie altogether. That’s really for you to decide, I say. But there’s no shame in the truth. It’s fairer on everybody.
The woman looks at me again. I squat in front of her beside the bed. She smooths the skirt down onto her knees.
I must be transparent, she murmurs.
I try to give her a kindly smile but my face feels stiff. Behind her I can see the usual posters on the wall: surfers, rockstars, women in provocative poses. The bookshelf above the desk has its sports trophies and souvenirs from Bali and the computer goes through a screensaver cycle of the twin towers endlessly falling. She reaches for my hand and I give it to her. She feels no warmer than her dead son.
No one will understand.
No, I say. Probably not.
You’re a father.
Yes, I am.
Car doors slam in the street below.
June, would you like a moment alone with Aaron before the
police come in?
I’ve had my moment, she says, letting go my hand to pat her
hair abstractedly.
Jodie? Will you just pop down and let the police know where we are?
Jodie folds her arms petulantly but goes with a flick of her little blonde ponytail.
That girl doesn’t like you.
No, not much.
So what do I do?
I can’t advise you, June.
I’ve got other children to consider.
Yes.
And a husband.
He will have to go to hospital, I’m afraid.
Lucky him.
I get to my feet and collect my kit. She stands and brushes her skirt down and gazes back at the boy on the bed.
Is there anyone else you’d like me to call?
Jodie and two cops appear at the door.
Call? says June. You can call my son back. As you can see, he’s not listening to his mother. Excerpted from Breath by Tim Winton. Copyright © 2008 by Tim Winton. Published in May 2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

Reading Group Guide

1. The story of Pikelet's experiences with Sando and Loonie are framed by scenes from his life as an older man. How would you describe his attitude towards the young man he was back then, and toward the choices he made?
2. Is Sando a good influence on the boys? Does help them in any way? Do you think he has their best interests at heart?
3. Pikelet and Loonie come together as friends over their shared fascination with risk. How do they ultimately experience surfing differently? What is it about them that leads their paths to diverge over the course of the story?
4. What is Eva's attitude toward Sando's relationship with the boys? What feelings does it bring up about her own situation and her own history?
5. What do you think draws Pikelet and Eva together? What does each of them get from their relationship? Do you think Pikelet bears some responsibility for what happens between them?
6. Look the scene where Sando, Loonie and Pikelet go to surf the Nautilus (p. 144-147). Why do you think Pikelet chooses not to surf that day? How does his refusal affect the course of his relationship with Sando and Loonie?
7. Several times in the story characters mention a resistance to being an "ordinary person," and many of the risks they take are motivated by a desire to stand outside ordinary life. Is this a healthy impulse? Have you experienced it, or known people who have? How do people you know handle it?
8. Later in the book we learn that Pikelet spent some time in an institution. What do you think happened in his mind to get him there? How did the surfing and the relationship with Eva affect him later in life?
9. Near the end of the story Pikelet sees footage of an aerial skier falling, howling in agony, and it reminds him of himself, a "slow-motion replay of how my mind had worked for too long"(p.
214). What do you think he recognizes in the skier and himself?
10. Do you think Pikelet and Loonie learn something of value from the risks they take? Are they better off for having endured the fear and surfed with Sando? Is it necessary to take these kinds of risks in order to feel alive?
11. Why do you think it's so important for the narrator to show his daughters that he surfs, that he "also does something completely pointless and beautiful"? What kind of relationship do you think he has with them?
12. How do the two boys' relationships with their parents contribute to their behavior as teenagers? Is surfing and their bond with Sando somehow a reaction against the place they came

from?

Editorial Reviews

[Winton's] produced 11 volumes of novels and short stories, but he lives in western Australia, one of the remotest parts of the world. People don't know about him. They don't know what they're missing…Most coming-of-age novels end on a note of triumph. But Breath is about moving out of your depth, getting in over your head, having your soul damaged beyond repair…But against all this pointless sorrow, there remains the evanescent beauty of the world, and Winton matches that with limitlessly beautiful prose.
—The Washington Post

Carolyn See

darkly exhilarating…Winton, one of Australia's most acclaimed novelists, excels at conveying the shadowy side of his country's beauty, the way even the most ordinary landscape can exert a paralyzing hold …Winton's novel succeeds as a tautly gorgeous meditation on the inescapable human addiction to "the monotony of drawing breath," whether you want to or not.
—The New York Times

Jennifer Schuessler

Reviewed by David Maine

This slender book packs an emotional wallop. Two thrill-seeking boys, Bruce and Loonie, are young teenagers in smalltown Australia, circa the early 1970s. Their attraction is focused on the water-ponds, rivers, the sea-but they do little more than play around until they fall in with a mysterious, older man named Sando. He recognizes their daredevil wildness and takes it upon himself to teach them to surf. As the boys become more skilled, their exploits become more reckless; narrator Bruce (nicknamed "Pikelet") has doubts about where all this is heading, while the aptly named Loonie wants only bigger and bolder thrills. This mix of doubt and desire intensifies when the boys make a discovery about their mentor's past.

Surfing isn't the only dangerous game in town. As Sando's attentions and favor flip-flop from one boy to the other, the rivalry between the two, present from the beginning, grows stronger and more sinister. Sando's American wife, Eva, becomes more of a presence, too. She walks with a limp, has plenty of secrets of her own and becomes increasingly involved in Pikelet's life, in ways that even a 15-year-old might recognize as not entirely appropriate.

Winton's language, often terse, never showy, hovers convincingly between a teenager's inarticulateness and the staccato delivery of a grown man: "So there we were, this unlikely trio. A select and peculiar club, a tiny circle of friends, a cult, no less. Sando and his maniacal apprentices." The language manages to summon up both the uncertain teenager and the jaded adult: "It transpired that I was not, after all, immune to a dare," Pikelet tells us at one point, with both thebreathtaking unawareness of the boy and the irony of the man.

Told from the perspective of the narrator's present life as a paramedic, Breath aims to recapture a long-passed episode in a boy's life and show how this shaped the man he grew into. The story contemplates what it means to be less ordinary in an era when "extreme" sports hadn't even been recognized. (The fear of being ordinary is one of the terrors that drives these daredevils to push themselves ever further.) The author of 13 previous books, Winton is well-known in Australia and should be here. He touches upon important themes, of death, life, breathing and its absence, while looking dispassionately upon the relentless pursuit of thrills, pleasure, sex, status: the mundane obsessions of the ordinary and extraordinary alike.

David Maine is the author of Fallen; The Book of Samson; and, most recently, Monster, 1959.

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

Two boys, two boards, and a roiling surf. It might sound like heaven, but it doesn't work out that way in this engrossing new book from noteworthy Australian author Winton (Dirt Music). The narrator, Bruce Pike ("Pikelet"), is an awkward young teenager in the isolated coastal town of Sawyer when he befriends a troublemaker named Loonie. Riding the waves together (often at the expense of school), the two strike up a friendship with a freewheeling older man named Sando who, they eventually discover, was a surfing champion now living off the beaten path with an embittered American wife-herself a leading snowboarder waylaid by serious injury. The gurulike Sando leads the boys on to ever-riskier surfing venues, and when Bruce finally chickens out, he's left behind to launch a damaging affair with Sando's wife. The ending seems a bit rushed, as Bruce looks back over his derailed life, and why it got so badly derailed is not entirely convincing. But Winton is pitch perfect in capturing (but not exploiting) adolescent angst, and he describes surfing and the sea so thrillingly that even nonswimmers will want to plunge right in. For most collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ2/15/08.]
—Barbara Hoffert

Library Journal

Adult/High School- This novel transforms the dangers of surfing and thrill-seeking into a powerful metaphor for the transition from childhood to adulthood. Bruce "Pikelet" Pike and his friend Loonie, both 12, are looking for a way of life different from what home and school offer them. Living in a small, working-class town on the west coast of Australia in the 1970s, they turn to surfing as their escape. At first, they manage little beyond paddling offshore on flimsy boards. But everything changes when they meet Sando, an aging hippie-guru with a love of sports and danger. He takes the boys under his wing, first by letting them store their boards at his home and later by encouraging them to chase after increasingly dangerous waves. Ordinary life becomes boring and colorless to the boys when compared to the magic they feel when blasting through the churning water. The surfing sequences are beautifully and excitingly described, giving an easy hook to an otherwise emotionally complicated novel. Jealousy enters the relationship when Sando takes Loonie on a surfing tour through the Pacific Islands, leaving Pikelet behind with Sando's bitter wife. The two bond through their pain at being left behind and question the place of thrill-seeking in their lives. Their friendship takes a sexual turn, making this novel best for more mature teens. Told as a retrospective tale, Winton's story mixes the frenetic excitement and confusion of adolescence with the perspective and wisdom of adulthood, making this book a unique reading experience.-Matthew L. Moffett, Pohick Regional Library, Burke, VA

School Library Journal

Sun, surf and the '70s Down Under provide the backdrop for the story of a boy's awakening through rough sex. Paramedic Bruce Pike and his partner answer a medical emergency call at a suburban home. In a bedroom crowded with rock-star and hot-chick posters, Bruce finds the body of a 17-year-old boy who appears to have committed suicide. But Bruce, a middle-aged dad, knows better, and the narrative turns back to his adolescence to explain how he knows. Australian author Winton (The Turning: Stories, 2005, etc.) offers a tight narrative notable for its empathetic characters and effectively spare use of shock. Growing up in the tiny outback town of Sawyer, Bruce is besotted with swimming. His quiet, orderly parents don't dig his friendship with surf-and-diving whiz Loonie, a daredevil one year older than Bruce. Even less do they cotton to Sando, the hippie surf-stallion who becomes the boys' guru and guide to All Things Wild. Discovering that Sando had been a star of sorts at the sport of hanging ten, they worship him even more as he takes them farther out to higher and higher waves. Equally compelling, in a more fearsome way, is Sando's squeeze, blonde, scornful, tight-bodied Eva. She was once famous, too, the boys find out, a Snow Goddess skiing champ. As Loonie and Sando dangerously bond, Bruce falls for aloof Eva. Her tour of the mysteries of love includes introducing him to her dangerous fixation on auto-asphyxiation for maximum erotic kicks. So when paramedic Bruce examines the body of the 17-year-old suspected of killing himself, he blames thrill-gone-wrong sex. Bruce has been there, done that and emerged wiser, world-weary and chastened. Period details like Eva's Captain Beefheart andRavi Shankar records add verisimilitude, and Winton handles youthful angst like a hipper John Knowles. Lyricism empowers this stoner rite-of-passage saga, which also conveys a timeless pathos.

Kirkus Reviews

Majestic . . . charged with physical danger, physical courage, and Winton's brand of rugged introspection.” —The New York Review of Books

“Plunge into this novel and you, too, will be pulled under.” —The Miami Herald

“Stunning in the depth of its audacity...Limitlessly beautiful prose.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Darkly exhilarating...A tautly gorgeous meditation on the inescapable human addiction to 'the monotony of drawing breath,' whether you want to or not.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Both a hymn to the beauty of flying on water and a sober assessment of the costs of losing one's balance, in every sense of the word.” —The New Yorker

“A tender, incisive, sometimes brutal, and always moving coming-of-age novel...The prose is always astonishing, the descriptions of sea and weather especially vivid....The book seems as simple, and as vital, as the act of breathing itself.” —The Seattle Times

“Breath is a coming-of-age novel written with Tim Winton's customary tenderness and vivid sense of place and psychological truth. He manages to portray brilliantly made characters against a mythic landscape, thus creating a narrative that is gripping and breath-taking both in its vast scope and in its use of emotional detail. This is his most forceful and perfect novel to date.” —Colm Toibin, author of The Master

“The book's main characters jump off the page....And, as in previous Winton novels, the prose is always astonishing, the descriptions of sea and weather especially vivid....In the end, the book seems as simple, and as vital, as the act of breathing itself.” —Adam Woog, The Seattle Times

From the Publisher

This aptly titled novel knocks the breath out of the listener as it recounts a youth's daredevil surfing exploits, evoking the fragile balance between life and death. Paramedic Bruce Pike looks back in this coming-of-age story of his thrill-seeking youth in 1970s Australia. He and his friend, Loonie, meet a charismatic surfing legend named Sando, who mentors them in the science and art of surfing, and drives them to more and more reckless behavior. Dan Wyllie delivers an easily understandable Australian accent and shifts subtly between tentative teen and jaded adult. Wyllie’s delivery of Winton’s vivid descriptions is mesmerizing, and he ably conveys the image of breath as a metaphor throughout the story. This compelling novel may entice the listener to seek out the well-known Australian author’s many other works. A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2009 - AudioFile