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.

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 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