The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa.

I really enjoyed reading this week’s novel; I honestly feel like the books get more easier to read the more we go further into the course, and I’m not sure if it’s just me learning how to ‘read’ books or if the books get more digestible as time goes, as they become more modern.? Anyways, I loved the short chapters – it suited my easily distracted mind and I could read them without getting bored fast.

As I got into the story, as much as I enjoyed the plot-twist and drama happening at the end, I loved the concept of Ventura’s job as a changer of the past. I have seen something like that before in the series Breaking Bad, where you can change your identity as a whole and start your life fresh, but I never thought of it in a way of pasts. It makes me think how our identity is so tightly connected to our pasts, that it basically defines us as a whole. More than your hobbies or interests, your past experiences, the people you have made relationships with, the things you saw, those are what shapes you as a person, and furthermore changes your personality, which is a large indicator of our selves. I’ve been thinking about identities a lot, in such I was wondering if I could change my identity as I came here from across the world with almost nobody to know my true self. That meant I could start my life anew, change my personality, the way I talk, the way I dress, etc.. just like Buchmann. But overtime, I really got that I can’t change who I truly am even if I tried, and the concepts of authenticity in building relationships stuck with me. I think this correlates with the idea of how you can’t really change your past that is illustrated in the novel.

Related to authenticity, also with duplication and dissimulation as the lecture mentions, the concepts of truth and lies are significant. Nothing in life could ever be free from the notion of dishonesty, whether it be jobs, relationships, everyday life. Try to imagine a life without lies, a world consisted only of pure truth, because I don’t think I can. I think it is just human to lie, or atleast be ambiguous about the truth. This is mentioned in the conversation between Eulalio and Buchmann in their dream, when they talk about truth.

“Truth has a habit of being ambiguous too. If it were exact it wouldn’t be human.”

Also during this scene, I thought I caught the drink for the week for the first time, the pitanga juice, but I was disappointed to see that it was not a pitanga juice, but papaya :(. (I went back and found the mention of the papaya juice tho)

Ventura’s job revolves around lying, making up a past from nowhere for people, creating duplicates. Almost everyone in the book lies, and Buchmann even uses lies for his mission, which makes me wonder about how lies are sometimes integral, even significant in our lives. This being said, in the end, the truth does come out. I am not sure what I’m trying to say here anymore.. Maybe that truth is indeed a ‘superstition’, and that without enough witnesses, any truth can be changed, or atleast dissimulated into something other, whether it be a small action or a whole identity. This also reminds me of the Akira Kurosawa’s movie Rashomon or the Rashomon effect, about the ways of thinking and interpreting of a single event, by different identities.

Anyways, I think the constant shift between the real life narration as a gecko and its dreams as a human could be similar to that of the multiple identities, or ‘present’ and ‘past’ identities that are shown throughout. It was a very interesting book, something I never would’ve thought to read!!

My question is:

Do you think you could live a life of lies successfully like Buchmann, act and talk like your other self? Furthermore, if you could change your past, what would you think you would’ve changed it to?