Honestly, when I initially saw the title of this book, I wondered if this was a book about chameleons, and I was even ready for it to be a book about chameleon science books. But when I finished the book, it was amazing to realize that this book is neither a science book about chameleons nor a book with chameleons as a clue, even in this book, chameleons are only mentioned once. ” ‘Lies,’ he explained, ‘are everywhere. Even nature herself lies. What is camouflage, for instance, but a lie? The chameleon disguises itself as a leaf in order to deceive a poor butterfly. He lies to it, saying. Don’t worry, my dear, can’t you see I’m just a very green leaf waving in the breeze, and then he jets out his tongue at six hundred and twenty-five centimeters a second, and eats it,’ ” (p122)

What’s even more interesting is that there are two main characters in this book, one of which is a gecko, and the book goes so far as to anthropomorphize the gecko and narrate in its own voice. In my eyes, this gecko of Eduardo Agualusa has a special symbolism. We can find this gecko was a man in his previous life, “Once, when I was in my old human form, I decided to kill myself. I wanted to die, completely. I hoped that eternal life. Heaven and Hell, God, the Devil, reincarnation, all that stuff, was no more than slowly woven superstition, developed over centuries and centuries out of man’s greatest terror. (p63)” Agualusa intersperses the text with these human recollections, depicting the past of others through the eyes of the gecko while also clearly recounting the past of the gecko “himself”. In addition, the main character, Ventura, feels that “the gecko smiles like a human” when he talks to the gecko on several occasions. The anthropomorphic writing style of these insinuations adds a magical touch to the form.

In addition to this, the gecko’s past life was painful, and it did not want to reincarnate and become human again, and in combination with the context of the Angolan civil war and the text’s idea that the gecko tried to commit suicide when it was human, and the solitary chapter that describes its confrontation with the rat in the crevice of the wall, we even get a sense of the gecko’s tightened breathing as it confronts the enemy, and the kind of dark fear that it falls into as it gazes at the enemy, and how in the end, when the rat walks away, the gecko the next day doesn’t not show up at Ventura’s house as usual as a result. We can guess that the gecko is a human being in addition to all the humans in the text, that it has experienced everything and foreseen everything, and that even if it is reincarnated as a gecko, it will not be able to escape from the precarious moment.

My question is: why does this book have the gecko as the first narrator and not any other animal?