The day that this book arrived at Women and Children First, after waiting for almost four months, I leave the bookstore with book in hand, go to my car, and my battery is completely dead. Finding no one to help jump my car, I decided to wait for my AAA service to show up with a new battery. Not a bad situation. Not in the least. I wish I’d always get car trouble with a new book in the vicinity. Having never read a Buarque piece in my life I have to admit this may not be the book to begin with. The book is written in such a stream of consciousness method that you should require a quiet place to sit and read this book. The character development is a little erratic with sentences concerning issues not even talked about until several sentences later. It’s like a conversation being discussed before it happens. The narrator is Jose Costa and he is full of plight in his love life, work life, personally - a character indicative of the “man on the run.” There are some poetic bombs here - working their way into the book like small reminders of the prolific authors experiences and work (Chico is a composer, a singer, writes novels and theater). He is translated into several languages and his character Jose is madly stuck inside of one night stands, rendezvous in strange cities and emotional turbulance that I as a reader have found it hard to dislocate narrator from writer. Budapest is a work like no other I’ve read, and with all the talk about learning Hungarian in the book I must admit my curiosity for the foreign tongue has grown rapidly.