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by Rita Halász
A visceral and stirring novel exploring free will, memory, faith, and constructions of reality and the self, following a woman faced with the question of whether her marriage is abusive, and the life-altering decision of ending it.
When we meet Vera, her body and mind are on a precipice. She's just left her marital home to live with her father after her husband's violent outbursts reach a breaking point. She's experiencing sudden losses of consciousness, spells of insomnia and difficulty eating. Over the course of the year that follows, she reignites a high school romance, looks to her divorced parents for guidance, attempts couples therapy, struggles to mother two young daughters, develops a brief cocaine dependency, and tries to rekindle her artistic practice—all while questioning, in Halász's immediate, intimate prose, the infinite number of choices that led her to this difficult moment.
Towards the end of the novel, we follow Vera into a surreal funhouse mirror of a courtroom scene, equally comical and horrifying, where she must confront the many conflicting narratives of her marriage and separation and decide which one rings true.
With the emotional precision and formal elegance reminiscent of Natalia Ginzburg and Elena Ferrante, Halász offers a meditation on agency, subjectivity, motherhood, and the artistic vocation with an ultimately optimistic conclusion: life consists of forward movement, in which the biggest challenge—and privilege—is choice.
"[An] intelligent debut...Halász hits some false notes late in the novel, as it turns toward Vera's surreal spiritual visions, but for the most part, she vividly portrays Vera's world through a seamless blend of impressionistic narration and dialogue. Readers will find much to admire in this striking portrait of a woman's search for fulfillment." —Publishers Weekly
"Marriage and divorce are always compelling, but despite strong prose, this novel feels shopworn." —Kirkus Reviews
"By so sharply tracing the contours of Vera's relationship—and her eventual liberation from it—Halász turns language into a mirror, demonstrating how words can reflect back things we may not yet know about ourselves." —Asymptote Journal
"Rita Halász is the Elena Ferrante of Budapest, with a heartbreaking humor entirely her own. I loved this novel." —Jessi Jezewska Stevens, author of Ghost Pains
This information about Deep Breath was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rita Halasz is a Hungarian writer and art historian. Deep Breath, her debut novel, won the 2021 Margó Prize and was shortlisted for the Libri Literary Prize.
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