num_pages: 192
description: 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?
language: English
title: Budapest
titlecomplete: Budapest
characters: Vanda, José Costa, Kriska
genres: Hungary, Novels, Travel, Portuguese Literature, Brazil, Literature, Latin American, Romance, Fiction, Contemporary
ratings_count: 5043
places: Rio de Janeiro, Budapest
awards: awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
category: Shortlist, awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: Prêmio Jabuti
publisher: Grove Press