WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DULCE VEIGA?

The late (1948–96) Brazilian author, whose feisty prose is reminiscent of both Reinaldo Arenas and Manuel Puig (especially the latter's Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), offers in this haunting 1990 novel a fractious meditation on celebrity, human frailty, and the inexorability of time passing. A journalist's quest for the facts about an Edith Piaf–like singer's mysterious disappearance opens into a riotous anatomy of São Paulo as a garish "nighttown," an elegy for a generation destroyed by AIDS, and a muted lament for the "death" of sensuality and appetite in a country's youngest and most promising souls. An insidiously rich and disturbing fiction, the work of a remarkable writer who died much too soon.