One more reference to José Saramago for the road: An undercurrent to his blog that I didn’t give nearly enough credit to yesterday were his numerous suggestions of literature catching his eye. Understandably, he was most in touch with Portuguese-language fiction, and we as outsiders get to benefit from his critical eye. On Saramago’s recommendation, I grabbed all the novels available of Brazilian musician/writer Chico Buarque from the local library. Turns out Saramago knew a good read when he found it.

Budapeste is the first of Buarque’s I opened. Slim at 183 pages, it is a first-person narrative written from the perspective of José Costa, a Brazilian ghostwriter extraordinaire. In the vein of António Lobo Antunes’s works, Buarque uses no clearly marked dialogue. Scenes shift from thought to action, from action into utterances, and from utterances back into reminiscence with only occasional paragraph and chapter breaks to impose something of a structure on the tide of words. You get the hang of the style quickly and, once accustomed, you’ll realize you’ve blown through 100 pages in a day.

The conceit — of a ghostwriter who becomes obsessed with the Hungarian language on an unplanned layover in Budapest — seems absurd on the surface, but Buarque deftly spins it so that we readers discern a deeper logic at work. In fact, for those fascinated by the act and mechanics of language, it is typical for the fascination to eventually push beyond the limits of their mother tongue and towards the foreign. I can see in Costa, a product of Rio and Brazilian Portuguese inexplicably gravitating towards the comparably alien Magyar, something of myself, a product of the upper Midwest and American English with longstanding fascination of the Lusophone world.

That the story then unfolds through the eyes of a ghostwriter also offers up Buarque avenues to explore what it means to purposefully take on the guise of another individual entirely. You see the connections immediately: Professionally, Costa is paid to be someone else, and it isn’t much of a stretch to say he becomes another individual entirely when he immerses himself in Hungarian. Budapeste also marks my second read of the year with a ghostwriter at its center — the other, Javier Marías’s Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, had a similar setup, and unsurprisingly it was one of the best books I’ve read all year.

Call it more evidence that the cutting edge of the contemporary novel sits firmly outside the English-speaking world. It has for decades now.