Chico Buarque – författare

The narrator of this tale is haunted by nostalgia for the places of his childhood set in a city that can only be Rio de Janeiro. A drop-out from the privileged world of luxury beach apartments and sybaritic obsessions, he has entered the 'other' Brazil of wretched poverty and petty crime.

Jose Costa has just attended the Anonymous Writers Congress in Istanbul and is on his way back to Rio when a bomb scare on his flight forces him to spend a night in Budapest. Fascinated by the Hungarian language - he is after all a ghost writer by trade and a man who lives by language - he spends the night watching television, trying to pick out words in this tongue, 'the only one the devil respects'. In charting Jose's life we enter a storytelling labyrinth, as his myth-making, love-making and essays into another culture become mired in the world where celebrities make reputations and fortunes from the writing of others, and where the reader is not sure what language, or what reality, is being offered

Ciccio already has many problems: romantic failure, an older brother who seems intent on breaking the heart of every beautiful woman in São Paulo, a distant and larger-than-life father. When Ciccio finds, among the many of his father’s books that line the walls of their house, a troubling letter dated ‘December 21, 1931. Berlin’, his existential crisis only intensifies.It seems that his father once had a child with another woman – a German son whose fate remains unclear. Ciccio sets out on a mission to locate his lost half-brother, and to win the respect of his father. But as Brazil's military government cracks down on dissent, and rumours of arrests and disappearances spread, while Ciccio has been out looking for his German brother, he finds that he has taken his eye off his immediate family . . . In writing My German Brother, acclaimed Brazilian novelist and musician Chico Buarque was driven by the desire to find out what happened to his own German half-brother – whether he survived the war in a bomb-ravaged Berlin, whether he had joined the ranks of the Hitler Youth. His novel has been a project of a lifetime, one that makes use of what happened, what might have happened, and pure imagination, in order to weave together the threads of narrative and arrive at a truth.

Rio de Janeiro - Berlin. Für Musikliebhaber und Liebhaber verrückter Lebensgeschichten. Der Brasilianer Chico Buarque, heute weltberühmter Samba-Sänger, steht am Anfang seiner Musikerkarriere, als er von seinem Halbbruder in Berlin erfährt. Dort lebte der Vater in den späten Zwanzigern und verschwieg, dass er fern von Rio einen Sohn hat. Also macht sich Chico selbst auf die Suche und findet die bezaubernd, verrückte Geschichte von Sergio Günther. Auch Sergio war Sänger, und zwar einer der bekanntesten der DDR. Mit brasilianischem Blick zeichnet Chico Buarque ein überraschendes und sehr persönliches Bild des ehemals geteilten Deutschlands.