Book talk on The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Here is my book talk on The Book of Chameleons for my library science class after finding it on the Three Percent blog, an excellent source for news and reviews of translated literature. As I've noted before, the assignment requires that our book talks have to be very positive. But I honestly liked this book just as much as my book talks says! (Librarians, feel free to use this book talk as you like.)

Lovers of dreamy, experimental fiction, The Book of Chameleons is for you! Set in modern-day Angola, our narrator is a self-reflective gecko -- that's right, a lizard -- who lives on the ceiling in the home of Felix Ventura. Felix Ventura is an albino antique books dealer and seller of memories, and there's no shortage of customers. "They were businessmen, ministers, landowners, diamond smugglers, generals -- people, in other words, whose futures are secure. But what these peoople lack is a good past, a distinguished ancestry, diplomas. In sum, a name that resonates with nobility and culture. He sells them a brand new past. He draws up their family tree. He provides them with photographs of their grandparents and great-grandparents, gentlemen of elegant bearing and old-fashioned ladies. The businessmen, the ministers, would like to have women like that as their aunts ... old ladies swathed in fabrics, authentic bourgeois bessanganas -- they'd like to have a grandfather with the distinguished bearing of a Machado de Assis, of a Cruz e Souza, of an Alexandre Dumas. And he sells them this simple dream."

This fantastic premise actually works well with its real-world history of contemporary Angola, a former Portuguese colony on the southwest coast of Africa. In 1975, factions began fighting in a civil war there that was to last 27 years, dominated by Cold War politics. In 2002, the civil war ended. Angola has since been rebuilding its economy, primarily through oil exports. The cross-section of people who come to buy memories in 2004 from Felix Ventura represent the cross-section of people trying to reinvent themselves in post-civil war society.

In The Book of Chameleons, a retired photojournalist and war photographer comes to Felix Ventura and buys the identity of Jose Buchman, a persona that Ventura has invented based on his history books and antiquities. Buchman returns not long after, telling Felix he has been to the village where his "father" lived and photographed his father's grave. Buchman travels to New York City to find his American "mother," then follows her to South Africa. How can this be, Felix wonders? Meanwhile, the gecko meets Buchman in a series of dreams. The neighborhood hobo -- formerly, one of Angola's once-powerful Marxists -- is staking out Felix's house, while Felix's new lady love Angela Lucia visits regularly. The characters all take their parts in a murder mystery that comes together only at the book's conclusion.

The book's author, Jose Eduardo Agualusa, was born to Portuguese parents in Huambo, Angola, in 1960. The Book of the Chameleons won the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, a prize for fiction in translation published in the United Kingdom, and it was the first book written by an African author to win the book. Agualusa, a fiction writer and a journalist, has written seven novels, including Creole which was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature. Both The Book of the Chameleons and Creole were translated by Daniel Hahn, who also translated the autobiography of Brazilian footballer, Pelé, which was shortlisted for the Best Sports Book of 2006 at the British Book Awards. The 2008 American edition of The Book of the Chameleons includes a question and answer with the author and a book group reading guide.

With its emphasis on magical realism and post-colonial politics, this book is particularly recommended for fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Fans of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges will enjoy the sly joke that the gecko narrator is Borges reincarnated.

This is literary fiction at its most dreamy and interesting, but it's also accessible to more casual readers, thanks to our approachable lizard narrator. The book is also short in length, so if you are looking for something to expand your horizons that's not too much of a time commitment, this book be for you: The Book of the Chameleons, by Jose Eduardo Agualusa.