Budapest: A Novel - Softcover

Buarque, Chico

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802142141 ISBN 13: 9780802142146

Publisher: Grove Press, 2005

Synopsis

Perhaps Brazil’s most influential and beloved composer and musician, Chico Buarque is also a highly praised poet, playwright, and novelist. In Budapest, Buarque introduces the story of a ghostwriter who immerses himself in the Hungarian language. José Costa lives in Rio de Janeiro. Fated to remain in the shadows of his illustrious clients, Costa breaks free of this fate and spontaneously buys a ticket to Budapest. In the city by the Danube, he falls in love with a strangely enchanting woman named Kriska, who offers to teach him the Magyar language in the most intimate of ways. First, however, 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, to turn himself over to a strange, hallucinogenic world of pumpkin rolls, late-night discos in old Buda, endless bottles of Trojak wine, and, of course, 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?

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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About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0802142141
• ISBN 13: 9780802142146
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192