Chico Buarque began as a composer of pop music and, in the 1960s, rose to become one of Latin America’s most successful songwriters. However, he harbored a long ambition to write fiction, and began publishing novels in 1991. In BUDAPEST, his third, a professional ghostwriter named José Costa finds himself briefly in Budapest after his plane is grounded because of a terrorist scare. He is somewhat reluctant to return to Rio (Buarque’s own city), where his marriage to Vanda is on the rocks. Once there, haunted by the Hungarian language, he returns to Budapest for a longer stay, falls in love with his language teacher, and eventually publishes a book of poetry in Hungarian under the pseudonym Zsoze Kósta. Buarque’s novel plays with the idea of doubles, with questions of identity, with the tension between the desire for fame and the need for anonymity–and with the contrasts between two fascinating cities.
