I liked this one! I felt like I read it in mere minutes, it went by so quick. I really felt this book, felt it sweating and sweet as I read it, as our gecko narrator scurries along the wall “like a tick on its host’s skin” and describes how the sun “silenced the birds, lashed at the trees and begun to melt the asphalt” (9). There was also this recurring image of stars I found quite beautiful:
“I could easily makeout the river, the stars spinning across its back” (24).
“It was as though falling from the sky were the thick fragments of that sleepy black ocean through which the stars navigate their course” (63).
Right up there with “The Shrouded Woman” in terms of quotability.
The back of the book misled me, though I have no complaints. I was promised a “completely original murder mystery” full of intriguing characters, but while there was great no mystery in the murder, the people were full secrets. We follow Felix Ventura, a genealogist, but also “a man who dealt in memories, a man who sold the past, clandestinely, the way other people deal in cocaine” watched by a gecko named Eulálio who is a reincarnation of a human (16). The two are both artists, dreamers:
“I create plots, I invent characters, but rather than keeping them trapped in a book I give them life, launching them out into reality” Felix tells the gecko in a dream (68). And they do a lot of dreaming.
That’s where things got messy for me but also made for some good food-for-thought. Dreams start blurring into the present, fiction starts bleeding into reality, and whole identities and even histories start being fabricated. José Buchmann, an identity Felix creates for someone, becomes obsessed with finding out about the real José Buchmann and turns out Felix’s false backstory bares an uncanny resemble to the real one. Or does it? Felix seems pretty chill and normal aside from his best friend being a lizard, so who knows?
(You know that audio that’s like “Nobody’s gonna know. They’re gonna know. How would they know?” Yeah. That was me reading about Eulálio watching them make up another backstory for God knows who.)
I think that’s why I found the whole José -Buchmann-searching-for-his-fake-or-real-past-thing to be kind of confusing. But Angela was cool, though. She can identify where any photograph was taken just by the light. Now that’s the kind of oddly specific, niche skill that makes you the kind of cool I aspire to be.
Overall, this was a confusing yet compelling read. Messy but very memorable and I will be thinking about it for a while so I didn’t mind.
Sofia
2 replies on “The Book of Chameleons (NOBODY’S GONNA KNOW)”
Yes, embodiment is a relevant theme in this novel, whether it’s the gecko’s or Felix’s. In that sense, there’s a “situationality,” so to speak: it’s through our bodies that we perceive the world. But the incorporeal, the stories, also play an important role. What must it feel like to be a human who is a gecko who is a narrator? Plenty of room for confusion!
I, too, was expecting an intriguing murder mystery when I went into this so I was quite surprised by that! Having said that, I did find it was easy to get through and I think a big part of that was the fact that it’s split into smaller sections/chapters. Makes it so much more engaging, for some reason lol!