Tim Winton is Australia’s best-loved novelist. Breath is an extraordinary evocation of an adolescence spent resisting complacency, testing one’s limits against nature, finding like-minded souls, and discovering just how far one breath will take you. It’s a story of extremes—extreme sports and extreme emotions.
On the wild, lonely coast of Western Australia, two thrill-seeking and barely adolescent boys fall into the enigmatic thrall of veteran big-wave surfer Sando. Together they form an odd but elite trio. The grown man initiates the boys into a kind of Spartan ethos, a regimen of risk and challenge, where they test themselves in storm swells on remote and shark-infested reefs, pushing each other to the edges of endurance, courage, and sanity. But where is all this heading? Why is their mentor’s past such forbidden territory? And what can explain his American wife’s peculiar behaviour? Venturing beyond all limits—in relationships, in physical challenge, and in sexual behaviour—there is a point where oblivion is the only outcome. Full of Winton’s lyrical genius for conveying physical sensation, Breath is a rich and atmospheric coming-of-age tale from one of world literature’s finest storytellers.
Breath
( dir. Simon Baker
)
Australia
:
See Pictures
Gran Via Productions
Breath Productions
,
2016
8569342
2016
single work
film/TV
'Based on Tim Winton’s award-winning novel set in mid-70s coastal Australia. Two teenage boys, hungry for discovery, form an unlikely bond with a reclusive surfer and his mysterious wife. The boys are driven to take risks that will have a profound and lasting impact on their lives.'
Source: Screen Australia.
No Laughing Matter : Laughter and Masculinities in Contemporary Australian Fiction
Penrith
:
2023
28462670
2023
single work
thesis
'This dissertation explores the role laughter plays in the construction of masculinities in contemporary Australian fiction. The texts analysed are Christos Tsiolkas’ Loaded (1995), Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip (2018), and Tim Winton’s Breath (2008). The diversity of these novels allows for an analysis of Greek immigrant, Bundjalung, and Anglo expressions of queer and heteronormative masculinities in Australian literature. The role laughter plays in perpetuating, or challenging, masculine constructions is explored in this dissertation through laughter’s socially corrective and socially defiant functions. Socially corrective laughter is an expression of laughter’s superiority theory, as developed by thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and Henri Bergson. In relation to masculine hegemonies, this dissertation examines socially corrective laughter’s agency in influencing individuals to conform to dominant discourses by ridiculing counter-hegemonic masculine identities. Socially defiant laughter achieves the opposite effect. This dissertation coins the term ‘socially defiant laughter’ to describe a means of laughing at hegemonic structures to resist the discursive control that hegemonic masculinities have over masculine minorities. While each of the masculine constructions explored in this dissertation convey divergent expectations, a communality is revealed in how Tsiolkas’, Lucashenko’s, and Winton’s expressions of laughter regulate the way individuals engage with these expectations. This dissertation thus shows that socially corrective laughter and socially defiant laughter are central to the acceptance or rejection of masculine hegemonies in Loaded, Too Much Lip, and Breath.' (Publication summary)
'The somatic effects of empire can be found in Tim Winton’s “pneumatic materialism”, an aesthetic preoccupation in his novels with moments of anoxia, or the deprivation of oxygen to the brain. This essay will consider how Winton's novel engage with pneumatic materialism in response to questions of uneven development traditionally associated with the Global South, thereby disrupting clear South–North distinctions. By blurring his concerns across the North–South divide, Winton shows a willingness to think of empire as a series of relations that are not bound by national or territorial borders so much as by substances in the air. He does this, I argue, in his use of the breath.' (Publication abstract)
