Fiction, reading odd

I don't think many people in the US know Chico Buarque, the Brazilian composer and musician. My friends know I love his music (I also love Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes), and this is why my pal Christie sent me this email, reprinted with permission:

"Is Chico Buarque a writer too, or is there another Chico Buarque? I saw this book called Budapest: a novel, and was leafing through it and noticed the author was CB. The book sounds very strange, which would make it right up your alley. I just thought I'd alert you to its existence. I was going to buy it, but I thought maybe you already have it. "

I didn't know Buarque wrote novels too. My curiosity totally piqued, I checked Amazon and found that this is Buarque's third novel. Clearly I've been sleeping on the job and not keeping up with foreign lit. Publishers Weekly reviews the book thusly:

José Costa, a vain ghostwriter and inveterate amateur linguist in his late 30s,is the narrator of this potent cross-cultural romp through Rio de Janeiro and Budapest. As Costa is returning to Brazil from an "anonymous authors' convention" in Istanbul, a bomb threat forces his plane to land in the Hungarian capital, where he is immediately bewitched by the Magyar language, "rumoured to be the only tongue in the world the devil respects." Back in Rio he starts to mouth Hungarian while asleep and ghostwrites The Gynographer, a farcically oversexed gothic autobiography. Growing tired of his job and sour marriage,Costa jets back to Budapest, where he stalks and seduces both the language and Kriska, a divorced mother who sadistically tutors him in Hungarian. Costa masters the language soon enough—too soon to be entirely believable—and begins ghostwriting in his adopted tongue until the authorities deport him on a visa violation. What ruse can get him back to Budapest and Kriska? Buarque( Turbulence; Benjamin), a renowned Brazilian composer and musician, concocts a predictable postmodern conceit to wrap things up, a smoke-and-mirrors metatextual gimmick. On the whole, however, this slim book—a hybrid travelogue-romance-satire-intro to literary theory recalling Gogol and Borges,among others—is anything but stale: dark comedy abounds, and Costa's metaphorical language about language is refreshingly lyrical, bracing and ruminative. -- Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed ElsevierInc. All rights reserved.

It sounds pretty weird, so needless to say, I've added this book to my list. It's only 192 pages anway, plus I want to see if Buarque's as good a writer as he is a composer. Besides, any book that has an abundance of dark comedy is a book for me. Amazon lets you read the first page, too. The book sounds totally promising.