Throughout this course, I’ve noticed a pattern in some books that the authors like to add a little sliver of fiction within their stories, but still have them very much rooted in the real world. In this book, we obviously have a talking gecko or lizard who can go into dreams, but also the idea of reincarnation. In other books, we see elements like people observing from the afterlife (The Shrouded Woman) or observing from a narrator’s perspective (The Hour of the Star) and this week we get observation from a lizard who was actually Jorge Luis Borges, a famous writer reincarnated. Perhaps that is what it takes for us to grasp death and see life from a different perspective, that we can only imagine what happens after, as no one can truly give an account from a dead man’s perspective.
I feel that this book does offer an interesting idea of what the past means and what defines one’s identity. For someone like José Bachmann or the client that Felix gives a new past to, he becomes obsessed and determined to even begins to try to convince himself to become José Bachmann. They say that people are made up of the sum of their experiences, and I think while this does hold, I think it becomes easier and easier as you get older to make some things that didn’t really happen into one of your experiences. If you think back as far as you can go to your young childhood, without the help of pictures or videos, how much can you really remember? Furthermore how do you know that these things really happened, think about any childhood videos you have seen and how much of them you remember doing, because typically when I watch one I don’t remember anything from back then. When I do think about past events from my life I now wonder how they make me who I am, as I’m not sure how much of ME is actually based on me scoring my first soccer goal for example.
Overall I think this book is very well written with a unique premise I haven’t quite seen before (Felix the post-wartime past rewriter), and I think many of the characters bring intrigue without having to go to great lengths into their backstory or all of their small details such as their favorite drink or snack (As books like The Hour of the Star do). 3.7/5
For this week’s question, what animal would you want to be reincarnated into after you die?