Word: winton
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...WINTON...
...difficult to imagine that teenagers living in a place filled with swamp snakes, blue-tongue lizards and wobbegongs (carpet sharks) would still experience itchy adolescent ennui: the desire for something--anything--to happen. But that's exactly what Winton deftly captures in his linked collection, set in the hardscrabble whaling town of Angelus, in Western Australia. We follow Vic, the most developed of the characters in the book, as he confronts the quagmire of family, the bitterness of pride, his own prickly regrets and the impossible, inescapable Australian landscape. It turns out he has more to fear from the dangers...
...Like Vic, Winton was born in 1960, a policeman's son who moved from Perth to the south coast as a boy. Unlike Vic, the author hasn't much to be disappointed by. With a cabinet of literary trophies for his clean, muscular prose (Nicole Kidman is negotiating to star in an adaptation of his 2002 Miles Franklin Award?winning Dirt Music), this former small-town boy is the ultimate sea-changer. Yet in The Turning, Winton presides as the deity of disappointment - from the opening lines of the first story, Big World, where two beachcombing mates graduate from high...
...Winton's novels, minor characters are often set adrift only to resurface in other works; here they overlap and metamorphose. The collection's most haunting figure, small-town crim and shark hunter Boner McPharlin, goes from being the sheepskin-coated kid glimpsed in Long, Clear View to the silent driving partner of the narrator of Boner McPharlin's Moll, who, decades later, returns from overseas to nurse him in a psychiatric hospital. At its best, the device creates a poetic sense of ribboning destiny. "Perhaps time moves through us," concludes the narrator of Aquifer, "and not us through...
...Elsewhere, Winton can seem to tread water. Using Vic as a narrative thread for otherwise disparate stories, Damaged Goods and Reunion, in particular, feel padded out. And reading about the marital difficulties of Vic and Gail can be as interesting as a bout of unsuccessful whale watching, to which his characters are also prone. Otherwise, trimmed of its middle-aged spread, The Turning is as lissome as Winton's best prose...