The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Book of Chameleons, by José Eduardo Agualusa
reviewed by James Crossley

Trans. Daniel Hahn. Simon & Schuster, 2008. 180 pp. Paper: $12.00.

The Book of Chameleons, a novel with a title having the ring of tropical kitsch about it, was originally published in 2004 as O vendedor de passados, which translates more literally as “The Seller of Pasts.” In some respects, that might have made for a better name, as it accurately captures one of the key figures in the book, Felíx Ventura, a lovesick secondhand bookseller who’s carved out another career forging respectable genealogies for upwardly mobile Angolans in the post-civil war era. He’s coerced into expanding his line by an offer of ten thousand dollars from a mysterious foreigner who wants an entirely new identity:  “[W]hy not? I’ll have to do it one day—it’s the inevitable extension of what I’m doing anyway . . .” And just as inevitably, trouble and violence follow. But the book is about more than Felíx, it’s about people of all kinds juggling different identities. Coming out of colonialism, the country is reinventing itself, trying to forge a future by reshuffling memories and forgetting the parts of the past that no longer fit. Agualusa’s Angola is a mélange of African, Portuguese, and Brazilian influences, and his characters are never fully settled in their skins, so chameleons they all are. It isn’t just that that inspired the title switch, though. Undoubtedly the narrator of the book played a part, being a sentient gecko who occupies Ventura’s house, communicating with him in dreams. This observing lizard, a kind of fly-eater on the wall, occasionally reminisces about his previous human life, and obliquely reveals himself to be a reincarnation of Jorge Luis Borges. In description, the novel may come across as a bizarre and confusing mix of the horrific, comical, political, sexual and intertextual, but in the reading, all these elements blend naturally, with subtle and supple results.