![]() ![]() ![]() Six years ago it was my view that his novel Shallows deserved to find a permanent place as a major work of Australian literature - a judgment I stand by. But they are taken up with such fresh mastery, and there is so much else besides, that the novel marks what amounts to a new direction for Winton. Fishing and swimming parents and children good and evil catastrophe and redemption what we live by: These and many other familiar Winton themes are revived in Cloudstreet. The sea - Western Australia's fabulous, blue-green, glittering Indian Ocean - is still here, fretting symbolically at the edges of people's lives. Winton is 32 now and the publication of his fifth novel, Cloudstreet, lays to rest once and for all the nervous feeling that one so prematurely accomplished might turn out to be a singer with, after all, just one or two songs to sing. Yet those who for years have taken an amazed interest in his work have worried: So profligate is this unlikely-looking young man with his gifts, his ideas, his word-wizardry, isn't he going to burn out like a spent candle by the time he's 30? WESTERN AUSTRALIA'S Tim Winton has enjoyed a reputation as a literary wunderkind ever since he won a major prize for his first novel, An Open Swimmer, at the age of 20. ![]() CLOUDSTREET By Tim Winton Graywolf Press. ![]()
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