Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga?: A B-Novel

A forty-year-old Brazilian journalist reduced to living in a dilapidated building inhabited by a bizarre human fauna--fortune-tellers, transvestites, tango-loving Argentinean hustlers--is called upon to track down and write the story of Dulce Veiga, a famous singer who disappeared twenty years earlier on the eve of her first big show.

Thus begins a mad race through an underground, nocturnal São Paulo among rock bands with eccentric names, feline reincarnations of Vita Sackville-West, ex-revolutionaries turned junkies, gay Pietas, echoes of Afro-Brazilian religions, and intimations of AIDS . . . Constructed like a mystery, the novel unravels over a week, evoking a decadent and contaminated atmosphere in which the journalist's own search for meaning finds its expression in the elusive Dulce Veiga, who constantly appears to him as if in a dream, her arm pointing heavenward.

Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga? is a descent into the underworld of contemporary megalopolises where, like the inside of a huge TV, life intermingles with bits of music, film clips, and soap opera characters in a crazy and macabre dance, moving toward a possible catharsis.

Author: Caio Fernando Abreu
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 01/01/2001
Pages: 206
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.96h x 5.50w x 0.57d
ISBN: 9780292705012

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2001 pg. 79
Booklist 02/01/2001 pg. 1041

About the Author
Caio Fernando Abreu (1948-1996) was an award-winning journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and playwright who portrayed, as no other contemporary writer, the myriad contradictions of urban Brazil. His untimely death, as well as his courageous stand o