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Why I picked it up: Another one of the 50% off bookshop bankruptcy sale buys. Plus, I really liked Dirt Music and The Riders (although I don’t think I understood that one very well).

Tim Winton writes about men.  Not just any men but a particular strain of men — loners whose outward … stoicism (for lack of a better word) … barely covers the fraying emotional hold they have on themselves.  “The school of Macho Romanticism, or perhaps better, Heroic Sensitivity,” the The New York Review of Books called it. They are good men, hard men and, in many ways, shattered men.  They could be American men (particularly of the John Wayne in the True Grit role) but — because Winton is Australian — they are not.  And they sit out in their Australian landscapes which is as harsh and unforgiving as they are to themselves. Breath is no exception. Maybe because these protagonists are Australian Macho Romantics rather than American Marlboro Men, they are also supremely cognizant of their isolation, painfully aware of how close to the edge they are. There is something primal keeping them living.

Which is what I think every time I see people who push themselves and their bodies to extreme measures.  There’s something primal and unnameable and awesome about it.  I don’t mean awesome as in cool.  I mean awesome as in filling one with a sense of awe.  The Olympics — with their marathon runners, their freestyle aerialist skiers — are one place to see it but any Everest IMAX movie or hard-core surfing documentary does the same thing.  What is driving them from an ordinary life into an extraordinary one?

Basic plot in marketing copy prose: Bruce Pike can feel the weight of his small Australian town pressing down on him, full of people who are afraid of the sea and the forest that surround them with little that is graceful or beautiful about them; “apart from that …. there wasn’t much room for beauty in the lives of our men.”  Then in his eleventh year, he makes a friend Loonie and is introduced to the sea.  Life becomes suddenly exhilarating — open, risky and bright — particularly when he and Loonie met their surfing guru, Sando.  It is with Sando as their leader that the boys drift ever closer to the edge until, finally, Pike discovers the limits of what he is willing to risk in his interactions with Sando’s damaged wife.

But here’s what it’s really about: The book is — in its simplest form — about breathing.  How necessary it is to us and how we fight to protect that breath from the very first time we draw it. And how the weight of breath — of its ordinariness, of its necessity — can become a burden.  We are always waiting for it to stop.  Sometimes we want it to stop because we want to feel the lack of it, we want to need it.  We use it to create the boundary of our fear, of our life, of our death.  And some chase death because we are hooked on that rush, to create extraordinariness out of our ordinary lives  So it’s also about that which we can bear and that which we cannot; the boundary between our need and our fear and how to live within what we have lost. How knowing we are afraid of death does not make us less vulnerable to it.  How what we are as children, what we learn and what we carry out of adolescence haunts us.  And then, in the end, it’s about beauty and youth and grace and how little there is of that in our lives and so, then, how deeply we cling to those memories and those moments when were were beautiful and young and graceful.  And alive.

Random yet representative quote: And though I’ve lived to be an old man with my own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.