EBOOK
About
In a nameless Hungarian town, teenagers on a competitive swim team occupy their after-training hours with hard drinking and fast cars, hash cigarettes and marathons of Grand Theft Auto, the meaningless sex and late-night exploits of a world defined by self-gratification and all its attendant recklessness. Invisible to their parents and subject to the whims of an abusive coach, the crucible of competition pushes them again and again into dangerous choices. When a deadly accident leaves them second-guessing one another, they're driven even deeper into violence.
Brilliantly translated into breakneck English by Ildikó Noémi Nagy, Dead Heat is a blistering debut and an unforgettable story about young men coming of age in an abandoned generation.
Brilliantly translated into breakneck English by Ildikó Noémi Nagy, Dead Heat is a blistering debut and an unforgettable story about young men coming of age in an abandoned generation.
Related Subjects
Reviews
"This is a satire of the bleakest strain: there is scarcelty 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
Kirkus
"Let's say it up front: reading Dead Heat, the Hungarian writer Benedek Totth's first novel, is a shock ... [like] the cry of love and desperation flung out by a generation that's finished before it can begin, before it can even reach maturity."
Yann Perreau, Les Inrockuptibles