![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
2024/172: The Book of Chameleons — Jose Eduardo Agualusa (translated by Daniel Hahn)
The train gave a long whistle, then a bewildered, long drawn-out howl, like a red ribbon stretched across the seafront. [p. 122]
Félix Ventura, an albino, lives in a crumbling mansion in Luanda with his best friend, Eulálio, who happens to be a gecko. Félix is in the business of creating well-documented family histories for those who need them: "businessmen, ministers, landowners, diamond smugglers, generals". The novel (originally published in Portuguese with the title O vendedor de passados, 'The Seller of Pasts') opens with a photojournalist seeking an authentic new identity. Félix names him José Buchmann, and Buchmann goes off to explore his invented past -- finding elements that seem to be real.
Meanwhile, Félix begins a romance with the glamorous Ângela Luciá, who in turn introduces him to Edmundo Barata dos Reis, a homeless derelict who she says is an 'ex-agent of the Ministry of State Security'. No, howls Edmundo: "‘Not ex-agent, say rather ‘ex-gent’! Ex-exemplary citizen. Exponent of the excluded, existential excrement, an exiguous and explosive excrescence. In a word, a professional layabout." And (of course) Ângela, Edmundo and Buchmann turn out to have history together.
This is a novel about real and invented stories, about people's pasts and how they shadow the present. Eulálio, who shares dreams with Félix, believes that he was once a man: "It’s been nearly fifteen years that my soul has been trapped in this body, and I’m still not used to it. I lived for almost a century in the skin of a man, and I never managed to feel altogether human either." (There is a subtle hint that he might have been a particular man, a famous author. There are also hints that Félix has created a history for his reptilian friend.) The prose is gorgeous, the underlying story -- rooted in the Angolan civil war -- brutal and violent. I loved Agualusa's prose and will read more by him: and I look forward to rereading this novel to better appreciate how the final conflict(s) are foreshadowed.
Fulfils the ‘A Book By A Central African Author’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.