Budapest [Hardcover]

...unlike a lot of musicians, whose attempt at fiction comes off as stilted and short-sighted, Buarque turns out to be a great, tersely effective novelist. This, his third book, is a short-but-dense meditation on the parallels and interplay of love and language. The narrator, a ghost-writer named Jose Costa, first becomes infatuated with a foreign tongue, than a foreign tongue attached to a foreign girl. While his career peaks, he abandons his wife and fat child to surrender to the Hungarian language and his new teacher...this is only the beginning: Buarque packs a lot into 183 pages, and the two plots (the language and the ghost-writing career) intersect masterfully, leading to a miraculously antipodean conclusion that is neither uplifting nor depressing, just ingeniously circular. Bittersweet to beat the band, unnervingly precise, and immensley poignant, BUDAPEST is also granted with a great translation job from the original Portugese into English.

José Costa is a Brazilian with a rather unusual job: he is a ghost writer. Mainly that means that he writes a book and gets paid for doing so, while someone else receives the credit for the job. Costa is married to a successful journalist, and has a son. He is neither terribly happy nor horribly unhappy, but he wants to change his routine. That is probably the reason why he accepts the invitation to the Anonymous Writers' Convention to be held at Istanbul. Costa goes there, and has a wonderful time, but something life-changing happens to him when his airplane somehow gets stranded in Budapest (Hungary) during his returning trip to Rio de Janeiro. He hears the Hungarian language, and feels the need to learn it, to understand what makes it so poetic...

Unfortunately that isn't possible, and Costa has to return to Brazil, to his family and to his job. But he won't be able to forget his ardent wish to learn Hungarian, and will even mutter some of it in his sleep. Soon enough, José Costa knows that he is a man with a mission: he must return to Budapest and learn Hungarian, "rumoured to be the only tongue in the world the devil respects.". In that trip and in others that will come, Costa will find the meaning of Hungarian, of languages, and of words, and will rediscover the magic of his own language by forbidding himself to speak it for a long time ("Perhaps it was possible to replace one language with another in my head, little by little, discarding a word for every word acquired. For a time, my head would be like a house undergoing renovations, with new words being hoisted up through one ear and the rubble being lowered down through the other"). There will be another woman, and another boy, a possible family so similar to his own... All that, in Budapest, the yellow city in Hungary that will compete with Brazil and Rio de Janeiro for Costa's allegiance. Some questions stand out so much that even the reader will have to find an answer of his own. For instance, are we necessarily born into a language, or can we adopt the one that pleases us most?.

"Budapest" is a strange book, somehow confusing at times, but also deeply engaging. The reader will be interested in Costa's life as he travels once and again between Rio de Janeiro and Budapest, but also on the many reflections on the nature of words, language, life, anonymity and fame that appear in this book. Of course, the author of "Budapest" is as peculiar as the book itself. Chico Buarque is a famous Brazilian artist, better known for his music than for his books. Notoriously press-shy, he might even see himself as a kind of José Costa, someone who wants to write just for the sake of it, not needing fame to be happy.

Chico wrote this book without having visited Budapest, merely with the help of a dictionary and a tourist guide of that city. Disregarding that, the results were wonderful, something the reader will be able to appreciate even in "Budapest"'s translation to English. This translation cannot help but lose some of the charm that is intrinsic to the Portuguese language, despite being very good. All the same, it is as good as one can be, due to the fact that Buarque worked alongside the translator who did it, in order to help when some things had to be rewritten because "They did not translate".

"I'm an amateur" said Chico Buarque in an interview about "Budapest". "It's the same with songs. I'm not a professional. Yet somehow I manage to get away with it". I think that in this case, as in many other occasions, Buarque is being overly modest. This book is well-worth reading, because it has an interesting plot and a great development of it. Those are the reasons why I recommend it to you :)

Belen Alcat

This slim, lyrical novel by Brazilian songwriter and musician Chico Buarque was a bit of an enigma to me. Although it begins in a relatively conventional manner, eventually it slips into a surreal, unreliable account that probes the relationship between identity and language. Conceptually, that made the novel more intriguing, but the final chapters seemed rushed - especially in relation to the leisurely pace of the beginning. In that rather abrupt shift in both pace and purpose, I'm left feeling that I missed anything deeper that Mr. Buarque may have tried to communicate. On its own terms, I still think the novel is more successful than not, but similar to the only work I've read of Roberto Bolaño (Monsieur Pain), it strikes me as too self-contained - not irrelevant, but not especially pertinent to anything outside of itself.

Ghostwriter José Costa, on a flight from Istanbul to Rio de Janeiro, is unexpectedly detained in Budapest, where he becomes enamored with the Hungarian language. It has such a siren-like draw on him, that when difficulties arise in his marriage, he chooses to return to Budapest rather than follow his wife to London for their annual vacation. Immersing himself into the life and language of the country, he stays for months, finding a teacher as well as a lover.

As I read up to this point, I resigned myself to the idea that I had picked up a competent yet pedestrian novel of a writer's mid-life crisis, and when José leaves Hungary to return to his wife and child in Brazil, I expected a conventional ending. But here is where the story began to take on an odd shape. As a ghostwriter, José's last assignment had been to invent a biography for a wealthy but unremarkable man, and his over-the-top efforts have turned the man into a celebrity; when he returns to Brazil, he finds his wife is having an affair with this man, one whom José had essentially written into existence. Ironically, she is enamored with the man only because of José's words, something José had wanted for their entire marriage. Incensed and infuriated that his wife is loving him vicariously through this other man, he again stomps off to Hungary.

To summarize anymore will reveal too many of the charms of the novel - suffice it to say that eventually, we come to doubt the reality of everything that has come before, and if we accept the fact that José can 'create' a man through his ghostwriting, then who has created José ? The Publisher's Weekly review from the novel's product page has a nifty phrase (metatextual gimmick) to describe the ending, which seems pretty apt as the novel constricts around the reader's mind like a Chinese finger trap the more we try to wriggle through it. Readers who delight in word games and literary paradoxes should find exactly what they are looking for in 'Budapest' - if they hang with it to the end.

But I wonder as to whether it will have much broader appeal. Readers who are interested in a more straight-forward narrative will likely be frustrated, and those who *do* enjoy literary games will probably be left puzzling over what it is that the exercise is designed to do. In the end, it may best be described as a quirky vacation read, flawed yet lyrical and fun - but ultimately too intent on its circular track of internal logic for me to ever feel connected to it.