Deep Breath

Összefoglaló

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<BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>"Halász’s terse and unsparing syntax mirrors her protagonist’s disorientation, splicing together different conversations and memories in the span of a paragraph, sometimes even a single sentence... It’s a testament to both Halász’s and Herbert’s narrative talents that even when Vera’s mind tips over a precipice, the reader is still able to parse her spiraling consciousness... Remarkable." —Jane Hu, The New York Times Book Review