Dead Heat

(Paperback)

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Description

Winner of the 2015 Margo Award (Hungary) for best first book of prose A coming-of-age story narrated in colloquial first-person by a seventeen-year-old, the translation is immediate and compelling. Totth's debut follows a group of disaffected teenage boys-16 or 17 years old-in contemporary Hungary. They are members of an elite competitive swim team, but also abuse alcohol, have a lot of sex with adolescent girls, drive cars fast, possibly run over an old man, and finally find themselves involved in a murder. They are the first generation of Hungarians to experience neither Nazi invasion nor Communist dictatorship, yet, deprived of the need to struggle against these forces, they find little meaning in life unless they are experiencing its extremes. The author is the Hungarian translator of Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy (as well as The Hunger Games), and their influence on his own work is clear.

Reviews

Praise for Dead Heat

"Dead Heat is steeped in nihilism and intoxication, frequent violence and brutality, a casual acceptance (and frequent occurrence) of sexual assault. One wants to believe it's over the top, but the novel's accepting tone casts everything in the cold light of verisimilitude ... whereas history is said to be written by the winners, coming-of-age fiction tends to be written by, or of, the losers (to steal a label from Stephen King's IT), the outsiders, the underdogs. In Dead Heat, the focal characters are the local elite: members of a champion swim team, popular at school, with several members of the group coming from wealthy families. The disturbing levels of brutality, and their complete lack of consequences, may simply be a reflection of the way it has always been for the stars of the teen world, and the world at large ... However you analyze it, Dead Heat is a valuable read, and has the feel of an important book. Consider this an opportunity, then, to brace yourself for what you will find between the covers."Toronto Star

"This is a satire of the bleakest strain: there is scarcely a page that does not offend. And yet the result is utterly enthralling As savage, reckless, and abhorrent as the world Totth delivers is, what's worse is how frighteningly real it all feels. Dead Heat is an undeniably uncomfortable novel, but so too is the truth it's trying to get at."Quill and Quire, starred review

"Totth's novel and its translation from the Hungarian by Nagy both excel in conveying the banality and numbness as its narrator proceeds through this parade of horrors.The juxtaposition of transgressive behavior with competitive sports recalls nothing quite so much as Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries. Like that book, the way in which this narrative is told makes for compelling reading even as the acts it describes can inspire shudders.Totth's debut is a harrowing experience but also a frequently gripping one."Kirkus

"[Dead Heat's] internal tension never calcifies into numbness or cynicism it never gets tiresome, but remains white-hot to the end ... The novels effect is cumulative rather than linear, and part of the storys absorbing quality is how lurchingly unpredictable it is."Michigan Daily

Lets say it up front: reading Dead Heat, the Hungarian writer Benedek Totths first novel, is a shock . . . [like] the cry of love and desperation flung out by a generation thats finished before it can begin, before it can even reach maturity.Yann Perreau, Les Inrockuptibles

A brilliant novel, but brilliant like a black diamond and cursed so that you dont want to hold it, a tale that never lets you go, no matter how much repugnance you may feel.Encre Noire

Intense, brutal and relentless. As on a mad merry-go-round, youre delighted not to be able to get off before its over. But watch out: the harsh form and subject matter will leave more modest readers shaken.TlStar

Dead Heat is about an empty world . . . its language full of slang, its elocution prizing sexuality, violence and luxury goods. Its hallucinatory moments call to mind classics of 20th-century American literature like Bret Easton Ellis, Raymond Carver or Hunter S. Thompson, or the cult movie Trainspotting and the violence of youth at its centre reminds us of Goldings Lord of the Flies.Magyar Narancs

"A savage world where teenagers roam like zombies high on drugs . . . a whirling sequence of fast-paced movie scenes, sharp dialogues and luxuriant visions.Szpirodalmi Figyelo

Dead Heat is a no-holds-barred portrait of adolescents adrift . . . The blue waters of the Danube have never looked this troubled.Paris Match

Benedek Totth darkens his pages with a boundless talent. He writes like a man screaming, moved by furious desperation. Totths dialogues show that he understands the power of humour, and he also knows that the world moves too fast and leaves those who dont know how to swim at the edge of the pool. A devastating, beautiful Noir novel.LExpress (Paris)

Author Bio

Born in 1975 in Vancouver, Ildik Naomi Nagy grew up in the United States and studied in Budapest at the Franz Liszt Music Academy and Etvs Lrnd University. Her short story collection Eggytrve (Broken in One) appeared in German translation. Her previous translations from Hungarian include Eva Fejoss novels Bangkok Transit and Vacation in Naples.