Budapest - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747573700 ISBN 13: 9780747573708

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2005

Synopsis

Jose Costa has just attended the Anonymous Writers Congress in Istanbul and is on his way back to Rio when a bomb scare on his flight forces him to spend a night in Budapest. Fascinated by the Hungarian language - he is after all a ghost writer by trade and a man who lives by language - he spends the night watching television, trying to pick out words in this tongue, 'the only one the devil respects'. In charting Jose's life we enter a storytelling labyrinth, as his myth-making, love-making and essays into another culture become mired in the world where celebrities make reputations and fortunes from the writing of others, and where the reader is not sure what language, or what reality, is being offered ...
Budapest is Buarque's most naturalistic fiction to date, and the funniest' Times Literary Supplement
'Perhaps the most beautiful of Chico's three mature books, Budapest is a labyrinth of mirrors whose resolution comes, not in the plot, but in the words, like in poems' Caetano Veloso
'In moving the narrator between Rio and Budapest, Buarque builds a brilliantly symmetrical design, incorporating two cities, two languages, two love affairs, and two halves of his hero's life as a ghost writer. Buarque's writing here has the alluring, poetic quality of a dream described aloud' Independent
'It is the risks he takes that give brilliancy to his tale. He tunnels deep into the human mind and emerges with more questions than answers ... It is a privilege to be able to share in that progress' Glasgow Herald

About this title

About the Author

Born in Rio de Janeiro, where he still lives, Chico Buarque is a world-renowned singer and composer. His novels Turbulence and Benjamin were translated into many languages.

From Publishers Weekly

José Costa, a vain ghostwriter and inveterate amateur linguist in his late 30s, is the narrator of this potent cross-cultural romp through Rio de Janeiro and Budapest. As Costa is returning to Brazil from an "anonymous authors' convention" in Istanbul, a bomb threat forces his plane to land in the Hungarian capital, where he is immediately bewitched by the Magyar language, "rumoured to be the only tongue in the world the devil respects." Back in Rio he starts to mouth Hungarian while asleep and ghostwrites The Gynographer, a farcically oversexed gothic autobiography. Growing tired of his job and sour marriage, Costa jets back to Budapest, where he stalks and seduces both the language and Kriska, a divorced mother who sadistically tutors him in Hungarian. Costa masters the language soon enough—too soon to be entirely believable—and begins ghostwriting in his adopted tongue until the authorities deport him on a visa violation. What ruse can get him back to Budapest and Kriska? Buarque (Turbulence; Benjamin), a renowned Brazilian composer and musician, concocts a predictable postmodern conceit to wrap things up, a smoke-and-mirrors metatextual gimmick. On the whole, however, this slim book—a hybrid travelogue-romance-satire-intro to literary theory recalling Gogol and Borges, among others—is anything but stale: dark comedy abounds, and Costa's metaphorical language about language is refreshingly lyrical, bracing and ruminative.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0747573700
• ISBN 13: 9780747573708
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 196