Customer Reviews

Budapest: A Novel

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...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.

I gave this book to my wife because Chico is the best songwriter ever and I wanted her to read something from him. She did some research in her homeland websites and found a Russian reviewer saying this book was the best ever-written. I agree with him. But you gotta understand that this book like a song, few commas, sometimes detailed, sometimes not, and he just keeps going, no stop. At one setence he is thinking how awesome would be to go back to Budapest from Rio de Janeiro, in the other he is in the airport in Hungary. And that's what makes it great, Chico is a musician, he doesn't have to explain anything, but you get it.

Women are the source of Jose Costa's inspiration, as he envelops himself in words, yet dreams of female comforts, enraptured by the sounds of language, even the brief snatches of Hungarian he has heard while on a stopover in Hungary. He writes about women, on women, inking their skin, arms, legs, torsos. One woman will only let him write backwards; she reads the words in the mirror, then washes them off so he can start over anew: "Recently written words, with the same speed with which they had been written, ceased to belong to me." A ghostwriter in his native Rio, Costas is fascinated with language rather than writers, attuned to the fluidity of language, listening to tapes of those for whom he writes; ingesting their spirit, he flawlessly interprets their lives, those who receive acclaim for what they have not written.

In a world where the famous masquerade as authors, their works are, in fact, created by men like Costas, bringing wealth and fame to the so-called authors. Costas takes inordinate pride in this ability, delighting in his private achievements, happy to perform this unique task. Life is fulfilling until he is confronted with the real meaning of such anonymity, his wife in awe of a book he has ghostwritten, but cannot claim. On impulse, he returns to Budapest, takes up with a language instructor, Kriska, who teaches him Hungarian, "the only tongue the devil respects." Once more, language defines him, becomes his obsession, Kriska the source of his knowledge, the muse that feeds his dreams. Back and forth, between two countries, Costas can find purchase in neither, familiarity altered by whichever tongue he speaks, images wrought by his women, Vanda in Rio, Kriska in Budapest.

Costas is conversant with loneliness, displacement and his own lack of identity, as though lost in a snow storm that obliterates all but the phrases that swirl through his brain. In a seamless narrative, Buarque transports his protagonist through two worlds, lost in a search for connection but isolated by his own proclivities. This is a shadow world, where talented men create for the inept, willing to market their words, caught up in the pure joy of writing. As each of his carefully constructed personas disintegrates, Costas must choose whether to hide among the clamoring voices of others, or to temporize and claim an opportunity for love. This man is sympathetic, brilliant, often sad, as he navigates the treacherous territory of self. Luan Gaines/ 2005.

This is a masterly-executed literary work with a well-constructed plot. There are no apparent flaws, the author apparently achieved everything he set to explore, except I could not stop thinking it should have a been a poem rather than a novel. Some reviewers criticize him for not giving enough Budapest-specific details but this is beside point as the novel is not about Budapest but about a particular human condition. It could as well have been set in an anonymous central European country.

The 40 year old individual telling us his story is not in a great shape - half hartedly engaged in his work of writing on others' behalf, less than half heartedly committed to his family, and just seemingly having a problem thinking straight and behaving coherently. He seeks a refuge from his troubles in embracing a foreign language and - surprize - a foreign woman. Now, for all the respect for the objective qualities of the work, it is difficult to enjoy it without experiencing some sympathy for the story teller, and it is my problem that I found pretty much none for this middle-aged trouble-seeker engaging into actions rather more typical for teenagers. It was all the way like been in a forced company of an inebriated and delusional person slowly letting the glimpse of the true events emerge from his stream of conciousness. It was an enervating and rather unpleasant read but I found that I had to finish it anyway, reaching the happy end (if there can be any happy end for a hero in his state of mental facilities). The author was certainly right in making it relatively short and may have missed an opportunity to create a masterpiece by writing it is a poem, which as a poet he probably could.

I wanted to mention that I started reading this book because it was one of the many praised by the late giant of modern literature Jose Saramago in his "Notebook". This one ultimately was worth knowing about, and I will continue exploring the others.

While refreshing, this novel does fall into the post-modern conceit of a writer writing whose work gets out of control and turns back against its progenitor. The twist, however, is the ghostwriting angle that Buarque inserts into a by now familiar plot, at least for anyone whose read experimental fiction of the past sixty or seventy years. Actually, I expected more of the Budapest sections, but much of this read takes place in Brasil. A dislocation that the cover art, reversing Rio and Budapest's tourist attractions with their pictorial referents, wittily prepares us for. The allure of alienation, of wishing to immerse ourselves into another tongue and place, comes out beautifully in the narrator's wish to wake up in a locale where he speaks a language everybody understands but himself!

The characters he engages with, his wife Vanda, his stepson Joachim, his lover Kriska, her son Pisti, along with Costa's unctuous partner Alvaro and his antagonist of sorts Kasper Krabbe, make for entertaining if at times puzzling antagonists. Buarque wishes apparently to obliquely introduce and manipulate his supporting cast so they appear as elusive as, well, those with whom we come into contact in our everyday world. The combination of the surreal and the quotidian makes here for a satisfying, if somewhat predictable in its climax and resolution, story.

Budapest: a novel was my first introduction to author Chico Buarque of Brazil. Apparently a world-renowned singer & composer (according to the book jacket info), this novel reads at times like a meandering tune. A lot of activity is packed into this short book, but the chapters in which Jose, our Brazilian narrator talks of estranged wife, Vanda, are written in a befuddling stream-of-consciousness mode that is hard to fathom and follow at times. Essentially, Jose--a frustrated ghost writer--suddenly opts to take a trip to Budapest and falls in love not only with the mysterious Kriska, but the Hungarian language itself ("the only tongue the devil respects").

Kriska acts as a teacher of the Hungarian language to Jose, our anti-hero, but other than continually describing her "white white shoulders," she comes across as a limp, poorly-developed character rather than the "enchanting seductress" as described in the book's promotional chatter.

It's not the fault of the translator of the story; Alison Entrekin should be commended for having endured and made sense of the stream-of-conscioussness prose in the various sections described above.

Budapest: a novel is a European story to be sure, and our narrator a seasoned traveller to boot. There is an adequate amount of references to the local landmarks of Buda and Pest: the Chain Bridge, Sugarloaf Mountain, et al...it would be a good read for those readers attempting to learn the Hungarian language, as it mentions the trials and tribulations of learning this most difficult of languages.

This was our book club book last month, I chose it because I was raised in Budapest and was eager to read something that brought back good memories. This selection didn't cut it by a long shot. While there was some Hungarian interspersed throughout, the fact that the author failed to once step foot in such a magical city really showed. Our book club rated this selection with 4 stars on a scale of 10 (10 being a best friend for life and 1 being a shameless waste of paper). Our readers found the book confusing, sliding from dreams to reality and interchanging characters in the process. The plot doesn't go anywhere and neither do the characters - a frustrating combination. The agony was cut short by the fact that it was a quick read. The artwork for the cover was well done, too bad the content between the two engaging covers didn't provide more structure and development. Reading this was like watching a fringe foreign film with subtitles that jumps from place to place, character to character without any rhyme or reason. When it ends you are left scratching your head wondering if you simply "missed something." In this case, you didn't.