This is going to be a post about the novels of Brazilian author and musician, Chico Buarque, but first let me tell you about the Portuguese in Translation book club (affectionately known as PINT), which I had the pleasure of attending online earlier this month. The book we discussed was City of God by Paulo Lins, a hardhitting semi-autobiographical, documentary-style novel made into the award-winning 2002 film of the same name and which deals with the violence, poverty and corruption at the heart of life — and death — in a Rio de Janeiro favela. Both the author and his translator, Alison Entrekin spoke and answered questions during the session and as you would expect it was fascinating to hear both their perspectives on the novel, especially as 2027 will mark the thirty year anniversary of its publication. Widely thought to be untranslatable due to Paulo Lins’ use of a very specific Rio vernacular, an English translation did not appear until 2004;  Alison Entrekin shared her approach to what at times must have been a daunting task, and she also recalled some of the more amusing correspondence she exchanged with Lins at those times when she struggled to find the right words — when the recording of the session becomes available you can listen for yourself and spare my blushes!

Now to Chico Buarque. The connection of course is that both novelists are from Brazil, and both are translated by Alison Entrekin, who clearly does not shy away from a challenge. The reason I began this post by talking about City of God is because I wouldn’t have come across Buarque at all if I hadn’t booked a place at the PINT bookclub, and my July would have looked very different and been much less fun. In fact, I have now read three Buarque novels, the ones pictured in the photo, and had my mind blown in three completely different ways.

To give him his full name, Francisco Buarque de Hollanda was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1944. He is actually as well known in Brazil for his music as he is for his writing, and his work in both artforms got him into trouble during the military dictatorship, first with his 1967 play Roda Viva (Wheel of Life), which led to a prison sentence and an eighteen month self-imposed exile to Italy, and then in 1970 when his thinly-veiled protest song Apesar de Você, initally slipping through the net of the censors, was brought to the attention of the authorities after it was adopted almost as a new national anthem by those fighting to restore democracy. This resulted in a blanket ban on Buarque’s music for a time, with all his music withdrawn from sale and from the airwaves. 

But what about the novels? Well, prepare to be sucked into a labyrinth within a vortex; embark on the worst bad trip you can imagine; enter somebody else’s fevered dreams; live a parallel life in another country and lose your identity; shake the dust from memories that, once pieced together, shatter every certainty your life was built upon — are you getting the idea?

I started with Budapest, definitely the lightest of the trio, and the first sentence immediately drew me in: It should be against the law to mock someone who tries his luck in a foreign language… José Costa is a ghost writer who, after an unforeseen stop-over in the Hungarian capital, returns to Rio with an unsettling urge to learn Hungarian, ‘the only language the devil respects’. So begins a journey into a geographical, literary and erotic hall of mirrors with some wonderful wordplay and countless moments where I was in awe of the sheer exuberance and ingenuity of the story.

Next was My German Brother, inspired by a real story from Buarque’s own family history. Buarque’s father had spent some time working in Berlin around 1930. Here he has a relationship with a German woman but they part and he returns to Brazil without realising he is going to be a father. He marries and has two Brazilian sons, one of whom, Ciccio, unearths documentation about his German half-brother and goes on a secret quest to ascertain his whereabouts — did he survive the Second World War, was he an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth, or did he die in a concentration camp? This is 1960s São Paulo, at the height of the military dictatorship in Brazil, where dissent is brutally quashed and people are arrested and ‘disappeared’, never to be heard from again, but along with the darkness there is much light and laughter in the novel, especially the portrayal by the young Ciccio of his family’s dynamics, his frequent antisocial behaviour, and his stream of consciousness imaginings of the possible lives of his older half-brother. Buarque successfully blurs the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, making the finale all the more poignant.

Finally, Spilt Milk, and what can I say? Definitely the most challenging of the three for me, but in the sense that I want to read it again, to untangle more of the threads, or quite possibly make them even more tangled. But really, that is the point of the novel, with Buarque providing us with an unreliable narrator par excellence, a centenarian who lies in a hospital bed recounting the history of his family and his country to anyone who will listen, how both entwine, and how an aristocratic past and connections in high places have been gradually reduced to destitution and a lonely death.

You will have gathered from the above that I am rather taken with Buarque, but I am certainly not the only one. And of course, without the craft and actual wizardry of Alison Entrekin I wouldn’t be writing this at all, although the first thing I did when I reached the end of Budapest was to start learning Portuguese…

I’ll end with this quote from Scotland on Sunday:

“So rich with ideas and form, yet so delicate and precise its poetry…Buarque is a puppeteer of a novelist, shifting narrative, time and place with mischievous strings…It simply demands reading.”