![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In his best moments of controlled, evocative storytelling, though, Winton’s descriptions eschew metaphor altogether and instead masterfully balance visual imagery with colloquial language. This is the recipe for his soaring popularity in his native Australia and also the reason he has garnered an international audience. Winton often locates a transcendent wisdom in nature, letting it guide his analogies to time, space, longing and the sort of existential entrapment that comes from being born into a particular place and culture. By the wave’s last section I was styling.” Then I leant into a turn and accelerated and the force of it slammed through my knees, thighs, bladder, and I came lofting back to the crest to feel the land breeze in my face and catch a smudge of cliffs before sailing down the line again. For a moment - just a brief second of enchantment - I felt weightless, a moth riding light. When the wave drew itself up to its full height, walling a hundred yards ahead as I swept down, it seemed to create its own weather. “All the way down the big board chattered against the surface chop I could hear the giggle and natter of it over the thunder behind me. But there’s a saltiness in “Breath,” Tim Winton’s newest novel, that offers an irresistible taste of oceanic communion: For this reader, who has attempted surfing only once, and only long enough to be washed ashore seasick, the siren call of the waves is faint at best. ![]()
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