It was pleasurable work when the wood was dry and the grain good and when I kept the old Kelly axe sharp.įrustration is mixed with sadness in a sublime emotional soup and captured in the ordinary – it’s classic Winton. Short, winter afternoons I spent up the back splitting pine for kindling, long, fragrant spines with neat grain, and I opened up the heads of mill-ends and sawn blocks of sheoak my father brought home: Sometimes in the trance of movement and exertion I imagined the blocks of wood as teachers’ heads. The axe is symbolic of the relationship between the young protagonist, who wields the axe, and his absent father: Winton wrote about axes in one of his early short stories: My Father’s Axe, from the 1985 collection Scission. There is a lot to admire, and a few butterfly wings to pick off if you like that kind of thing. His works are a feast of strange words and characters.
The earthiness of Tim Winton’s homegrown language and storytelling has its share of critics, but also plenty of fans – enough to sustain 40 years or so of professional writing.
0 kommentar(er)
