Volume 55, Number 13 · August 14, 2008
Walking on Water
By Cathleen Schine
Breath
by Tim Winton
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 218 pp., $23.00
Tim Winton, the prolific Australian author of Cloudstreet, Dirt Music, and The Riders, among nine novels, three short-story collections, six children's books, and three nonfiction books, has a genius for the ungainly comedy of family life and the isolated sadness of lovers. But he is also a writer who values themes, a practitioner of what might be called the school of Macho Romanticism, or perhaps better, Heroic Sensitivity. His novels, often set on the sea in Western Australia, are grand, gothically lyrical affairs, beautifully written and spiritually overwrought. They can partake of giddy magical realism, like Cloudstreet, the immensely popular 1992 novel of two families haunted by ghosts, angels, and a talking pig; or like Dirt Music they can partake of the solemn wilderness epic, placing a guilt-ridden musician on a remote island to hallucinate as he plucks on a single, droning nylon string. Winton's characters tend to flirt with death, long for death, while at the same time bravely suffering physical hardship in order to escape death.
Review, 3183 words
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