As the title of the book suggests, this book is about shifting identities. Felix Ventura has an interesting job – conjuring a new past for people who have a history that does not fit with their aspirations.

Agualusa has a deceptively simple style, and his book is filled with reality testing images and tangled histories. We learn much about the characters from a gecko living in the crevices of Ventura’s apartment. But even this shape-shifting narrator seems to have identity issues and has ‘other’ lives as a human – maybe even being an alter ego of Ventura.

I enjoyed the elegance of the writing and the twists and bends in and out of reality. It reads as thoughts and ideas rather than a plotted novel, and is necessarily odd. Despite the simplicity and brevity of the content, it demands a reread to review.

Recommended. ( )

The narrator of this book is a gecko, who lives in the house of an old man who makes a living selling fake upper-crust family backgrounds to self-made Angolan men and women. One of his clients is so taken with his new life that he sets off in search of the "mother" who never gave birth to him. Meanwhile, the gecko remembers his previous life as a human, and the old man reminisces about a childhood that may or may not have been his.

But - as the book asks - how valid is objective truth? Isn't something we believe we remember more significant than an event we have forgotten? Can't fiction and myth be more meaningful than reality? Shouldn't everyone be allowed to have their own truth, instead of being caged by mere facts?

Of course, real events have consequences of their own, and towards the end of the book, we are brought up short by an abrupt reminder that you can't always escape from your history, no matter how much you want to. But overall, the book celebrates people who create themselves - your past is vitally important to the person you are, so take control of it!

This is a wonderfully readable book, witty, perceptive, beautifully written, and full of significances that you spot the second time around. I had planned to quote the passage on the different sorts of light - but the last reviewer beat me to it. So I'll quote this, instead: "The foreigner ate with a glowing appetite, as though he weren't tasting the firm flesh of the snapper but its whole life, the years and years slipping between the sudden explosions of a shoal, the whirling of the waters, the thick strands of light that on sunny evenings fall straight down into the blue abyss." ( )

Very nice book with an unusual narrating character, the intensity of the story is managed through dreams experienced by the narrating character and "dialogues" with the other characters in the book.
Some interesting theories as well on finding anyone anywhere in a short timespan. I enjoyed this one from a, for me, unknown author. ( )

This book I am reading now, 'The Book of Chameleons' by jose Eduardo Agualusa, is really very good. It is the winner of the Independent foreign fiction prize 2007.

I have read it before, and am re- reading it now, because when I borrowed it from the library, I forgot I have allready read it. However, re- reading it, so much more things come to my notice.

For eg this paragraph on page 50.

'Sometimes, she said, she could recognise a place just by the quality of the light. In Lisbon, the light at the end of spring leans madly over the houses, white and humid, and just alittle bit salty. In Rio de Janeiro, in the season that the carioca locals instinctively call ' autumn', and that the European insist disdainfully is just a figment of their imagination, the light becomes gentler, like a shimmer of silk, sometimes accompanied by a humid greyness, which hangs over the streets, and then sinks down gently into the squares and gardens. In the drenched land of the Pantanal in Mato Grosso, really early in the morning the blue parrots cross the sky and they shake a clear, slow light from their wings, a light that little by little settles on the waters, grows and spreads and seems to sing. In the forest of Taman Negara in Malaysia, the light is like a liquid, which sticks to your skin, and has a taste and a smell.
Then further on she says, 'I am not sure I am a photographer, I collect light.'

A rather good description of what a photographer does.

I woke up this morning and looked out of the window and saw a misty scene. The first winter fog has arrived at my place. Such a lovely view, it evokes feelings of mystery, and secretiveness as well as tranquility in me.

The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese, and winner of this year's Independent Foreign Fiction award is an odd little book, but an enjoyable one.

Narrated by a lizard (a gecko, not a chameleon - the chameleons of the title are pretty much everyone except the lizard), the novel is set in the house in Angola of Félix Ventura, an albino man abandoned at birth who, as an adult, specialises in providing false histories for people who want to add flourishes to their family histories (adding in distinguished ancestors, that sort of thing). Félix happily confides to the lizard, who freely roams the house, observing all who come and go but remaining himself pretty much unobtrusively in the background ... the perfect narrator.

To start with, the novel seems as if it is going to owe more to the magical realism of the likes of Borges and Marquez (who get referenced), as the gecko intersperses description of what is happening in Félix's life with dreams of his own past, when he was a man, prior to being reincarnated in his current form. However when a stranger comes to Félix asking him to invent a complete past and new fake identity for him, which he eventually agrees to for a significant chunk of cash, and then elements of that past seem to start coming true, things start to take a more concrete turn. By the novel's end, the plot turns on a brutal part of Angola's recent post-colonial history, and what is effectively a murder mystery plays out through the past and the present.

Agualusa (a nom de plume) plays with themes of memory and identity, and the novel loops in and around, in and out of itself, as Ventura and the gecko both begin to realise what is going on. Relatively short, but very readable, this is a deceptively complex book that I suspect would benefit from a rereading.

And the lizard is great. ( )