Buarque has created a warm, engaging, memorable first-person voice in his credulous and well-meaning Costa, the whole...
A seamless, delectable narrative about a ghostwriter who immerses himself in the Hungarian language, by the daring Brazilian pop lyricist and novelist (Turbulence, 1991, etc.) who’s too little known here.
Jose Costa is the unappreciated genius behind the writing services of Cunha & Costa Cultural Agency, overlooking Rio’s Copacabana Beach: he writes speeches for presidents and heads of unions and, eventually, an autobiography for a German executive, Kaspar Krabbe, that becomes a literary bestseller. But writing another’s life begins to feel like “having an affair with somebody else’s wife,” and, though he puffs up with vanity, Costa isn’t really sure who he is. After an emotionally wrenching meeting at the convention of anonymous writers’ in Melbourne, Costa gets rerouted for the night in Budapest, where he becomes intrigued by the jealously guarded way that Hungarian is spoken by the locals—and by the sweetly bitter pumpkin rolls he devours at the hotel, a food that subsequently serves as a kind of madeleine to his memory. Undervalued by his agency’s boss, and by his lovely but spoiled TV newsreader wife, who thinks he’s a hack, Costa returns to the beguiling Budapest and meets up with the woman who will serve as his muse and teacher, Kriska: “One does not learn the Magyar language from books,” she informs him point-blank, then initiates him relentlessly, sensuously, into total immersion in her language. Back and forth between Rio and Budapest goes Costa—now Zsoze Kosta—his narrative fluid as he humorously mocks, then gravely assumes his new tongue, all in preparation for his abandoning Portuguese altogether and becoming an established imposter in his adopted language.
Buarque has created a warm, engaging, memorable first-person voice in his credulous and well-meaning Costa, the whole translated here gorgeously and sinuously: sentences at random can be picked and savored for delicacy and rhythm.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1782-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Ms. Jansson, who wrote those "Moominland" fancies for children, has directed her inventive hook-and-button plain talk at some adult concerns. In this series of brief dialogues and adventures of Grandmother (85) and Sophia (ten), the second childhood parallels the first in new awarenesses and incipient rebellion; but on the lonely way of the aging, hobbled by physical frailty, there are moments of sudden, inexplicable sadness. Grandmother and Sophia for the most part are honest contemporaries; they forage on their nearly isolated island, plot and explore, solemnly converse and flare up at one another: "Shall I tell [your father] how you were brave?" asks Grandmother. "You can tell it on your deathbed so it doesn't go to waste," says Sophia. "That's a bloody good idea," decides Grandmother. But while the family (the father is there but not heard from) goes about island survival and diversions—the lights of Midsummer Eve, drought, a flood and storms, an alien neighbor—Grandmother tentatively exposes herself to feelings about life and its endings: "Unless I tell [a tale from my youth] . . . it gets closed off and then it's lost." She is puzzled by an elderly friend's calm: ". . . don't you ever get curious? Or upset? Or simply terrified?" Old woman and child edge toward their own thresholds, and at the close Grandmother is resting and waiting. Spindrift perceptions, fresh and penetrating.
Pub Date: April 28, 1975
ISBN: 978-1590172681
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1975
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
APPRECIATIONS
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
None
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Brightwas from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned. But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
None NonePub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
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