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Budapest A Novel by Chico Buarque A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2004 Selected as one of Time Out’s 1,000 Books to Change Your Life ISBN: 0-8021-1782-1 / ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-1782-3 US $19.95 - 5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 192 pp - Oct. 2004 |
From one of Brazil’s most notable cultural icons, a brilliant new novel about becoming lost in translation
Not just one of Brazil’s most influential and beloved composers and musicians (voted as the country’s “musician of the century” in Isto É), Chico Buarque has won high praise as a poet, playwright, and novelist. Now he offers what Caetano Veloso describes as “the most beautiful of his three mature novels.”
José Costa is a ghostwriter—and not the kind who appears in all the magazines with models at his side. He knows he is fated to remain in the shadows of his illustrious clients—judges, politicians, the Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro—and that writing another’s life will always feel like “having an affair with somebody else’s wife,” but he takes his craft seriously. His best work is framed in his office overlooking the Copacabana Beach. But something is nagging Mr. Costa. While having a beer one day, he decides to buy a ticket to Budapest.
In the city by the Danube, he falls in love with “the only tongue the devil respects”—and with a strangely enchanting woman named Kriska. After insisting that one does not learn the Magyar language from books, Kriska offers to teach him in a much more intimate way. First, though, he must observe the old proverb—“there is no life outside Hungary”—and abandon his thoughts of samba, sunbathers on Ipanema, Sugarloaf Mountain, and his wife in Rio; and turn himself over to a strange, hallucinogenic world of pumpkin rolls, late-night discos in old Buda, and endless bottles of Trojak wine. And of course, always Kriska, the willful seductress and disciplinarian who is as hard to fathom and tame as the language she speaks.
But what will become of José, now Zsoze, when his time in Budapest comes to an end and life as he knows it is turned upside down?
Chico Buarque’s novel coils around the reader like a magical snake from the Arabian Nights—a darkly comic social satire and an elegant, witty exploration of love, lust, and reinvention that recalls Borges and Calvino in its literary playfulness.