The Book of Chameleons as a title makes me think about people changing their colours, and to my surprise reading the novel was exactly that but with a focus on individuals actually focused on changing their entire identities and lives because of their past and the narrator being a gecko?! This immediately made me curious about how identity and transformation would be explored in such an unusual and creative way.<\/p>\n
One of the most interesting parts was the curation of identities for various individuals. \u201cBut what these people 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
This idea of curating and handing out different identities to people just sounds childish, almost like you\u2019re engaging in pretend play like kids do. The more I read, the more normalized it got but still was very disorienting, in fact, most of the situations narrated in this are. However, it poses this question in my head: where is this something to be considered wrong or right?<\/p>\n
This was one of the most unique reads I\u2019ve had in a while (I feel like every other week I say oh this is different but truly though lately I\u2019ve been getting suprised). The narrator, the narration style, the chapter titles, the changes in perspective, I feel like this time around truly got me interested in reading and trying to understand the novel more.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n One aspect I’d like to explore in class is why the gecko was chosen as the narrator, and how Agualusa’s choice impacts our interpretation of the story. While the choice of a gecko seems random or sort of confusing, I think its perspective adds a lot t the novel and reinforces the exploration of identity, truth, and memory. Since it remembers a past life as a human, it already blurs the boundary between identities, which mirrors what F\u00e9lix is doing with his clients. It also looks at everything from afar, if you may say, which makes its perspective feel more philosophical and less tied to any one version of events. This made me think and ask: Are we supposed to trust any single perspective in the novel? Or is it that, depending on who is telling the story, the truth is always changing? Also, does looking inwards from the position of an outsider – does that give the gecko a better understanding of events, or is it similar to how we observe it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Book of Chameleons as a title makes me think about people changing their colours, and to my surprise reading the novel was exactly that but with a focus on individuals actually focused on changing their entire identities and lives because of their past and the narrator being a gecko?! This immediately made me curious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":94353,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[37,38,40],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agualusa","tag-agualusa","tag-identity","tag-storytelling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tripteasthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tripteasthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tripteasthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tripteasthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/94353"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tripteasthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tripteasthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tripteasthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions\/49"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tripteasthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tripteasthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tripteasthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}