The Book of Chameleons
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Product Description
Product Description
It is some way into the story of The Man Who Sold Pasts before it becomes apparent that the narrator - charming and witty as he is - is a lizard. This narrator lives on Felix Ventura's living room wall. Felix is a man who sells pasts, if you don't like yours he can come up with an entirely new one for you, full of better memories, complete with lineage and photos. This is a story of the landscape of memory and its inconsistencies and randomness, about how people can remember things that never happened with extraordinary vividness and forget things that really happened.
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First Sentence
I was born in this house, and grew up here. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
I was born in this house, and grew up here. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautifully and distractingly simple,
By Madly Bobbington-Blythe "MadBob" (Cardiff) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Book of Chameleons (Paperback)
What a great book! This is one of those rare pieces of literature that I will just have to go on and on about to friends, family and anyone who will listen!
Our narrator, Eulalio, (and this is not a spoiler - it says on the back cover!) is a gecko, living on the wall of a man who sells pasts. In his own inimitable style, he relates the goings on of the man, an albino Angolan, as he becomes entangled with The Foreigner and a woman who exudes light, two photographers viewing either end of a spectrum of an idea. It is truly a beautiful piece of prose, thanks to Hahn's deft handling of the translation, and the ease with which it reads belies the truth at it's heart. Whilst being a contemplation of memory, of truth, and of beauty, it is also a political commentary, a satire of bureaucracy and bureaucrats, and a great tale.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A breath of fresh air,
By Sofia (Bristol, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Book of Chameleons (Paperback)
This is for anyone who thinks that African literature is always a sombre,serious depiction of tragedy. Agualusa's novel though set entirely in Angola feels very European in tone and content. It's a novel of ideas, a novel of challenges, a novel where all is not quite as it might seem, where everyone is a chameleon.
Narrated by the gecko who lives on the wall of Felix Ventura's flat, the action follows Ventura in his business of recreating genealogies for those who want to reinvent themselves or reestablish themselves as people of worthy repute in the new Angola. He is visited by a shadowy foreigner and invents a persona for him, which he then seems to grow into until even Ventura is unsure of where fact and fiction meet. Into Ventura's world then come Angela Lucia (a beautiful woman with an apparently uninteresting past that would in her own words, make her an unsuitable character for a novel) and the homeless madman Edmundo Barata dos Reis. At face value, this is a compelling story of pasts and futures reinventing themselves and coming to a head. It is also a challenge to our understanding of truth and lies, fact and fable, the grey areas of history and fame. Ventura comes from a line of librarians and book traders and his musings on the depth of meaning found in what you read feels very real here. This is also a funny book, with plenty of wit and irony about the use and abuse of truth as perceived by different characters and lots of little literary jokes and comments about the greats of Portuguese literature and African writing in general. This is a truly unique book. It's ridiculous but intelligent, challenging but moving, thrilling but with much to muse upon after the final page has been read. For everyone who enjoys books and ideas, this is a really exciting voice from Africa, I will definitely go on to read his other work.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Borges in Angola,
By Oliver Paz (Lisbon Portugal) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Book of Chameleons (Paperback)
I really think that Agualusa's THE BOOK OF CHAMELEONS is something of a masterpiece. It's a wonderfully allusive, thought-provoking book where nothing is what it seems and all received wisdom and knowledge is challenged. It's beautifully translated by Daniel Hahn and is replete with powerful metaphors for African and Angolan history, without tearing on about them in the manner of, say, Chimamanda Adichie's HALF A YELLOW SUN. I read this book in a university department reading group and 5 out of the 6 of us thought it was something of a masterpiece.
Why Borges in Angola? Becuase there is a wonderful Borgesian style to the whole thing. In many ways the book is about the civil war in Angola, and yet it is rarely talked about directly. It is also about identity and race - the narrator is an albino in Angola, a wonderful metaphor - and yet again, it is rarely mentioned as such. Everything in the book operates indirectly and by implication, and there is a wonderful moral ambiguity in the book's ending which is a welcome respite from the dichotmous and simplistic morality so often found in the public sphere these days. Really, this is the sort of book that is never written in Britain any more in our media-obsessed and hyper-publicity age. It's a quiet, thoughtful, brilliant book - which all lovers of literature will fall in love with.
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