Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga?
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.
Not since Alfred Appel’s annotated Lolita clarified the subtle wordplay and allusions found in Nabokov’s masterpiece has there been such an accessible assemblage beneath the packaging of compelling entertainment, all neatly explicated by translator Frizzi’s analysis and glossary of terms.
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 on AIDS
and the growing popular interest in gay literature, will likely result in renewed attention
to his playful yet urgent brand of postmodern writing. Adria Frizzi is a translator and critic who teaches in the Department of French and
Italian at the University of Texas at Austin.
- Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga?
- Afterword
- Glossary
