Hello and welcome to this weeks blog post, this week I read “The book of Chameleons” by José Eduardo Agualusa, and I feel like I need to start this post by saying that I have so many thoughts and this might seem more like a ramble about the novel than a coherent post, there is just so much happening in this book and I might miss some things, but overall I just really liked the book, although like the title of the post suggests it felt like a bit of a fever dream at first and things could get a bit confusing to me.
For starters, i truly thought that the narrator of the book was a chameleon, like, it makes sense based on the title, but then I found out that he actually isn’t and it threw me off, another thing that I was confused about was the title, as I was doing some googling to find out more about the book I came across its original title in Portuguese “O Vendedor de Passados” which as someone who also speaks a romance language is not hard to connect that it has nothing to do with chameleons, but has more to do with the plot of this book as the literal translation would be something along the lines of “The seller of pasts”, I wasn’t happy about this because I thought this translation made no sense, however upon watching the lecture I learned that it was a deliberate decision made with Agualusa, after hearing the explanation about how there are all these characters whose lives and pasts are constantly changing, the new title made perfect sense.
The book present us with all sort of interesting characters, but I particularly found Ventura to be interesting, he really allowed people to live completely new lives than the ones they originally had and he seemed extremely committed to what I feel like can only be described as an art. As I read this book I kept thinking back to a quote from another book I’ve read, the whole idea of changing your past and becoming someone else reminded me of the following: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be” (Kurt Vonnegut, “Mother Night”, great book btw) It reminded me of this because if we try hard enough to pretend to be someone else, doesn’t that mean that at some point it becomes what we actually are? where is the line between our true self and the one we pretend to be?
I seem to be running out of words so I will leave my final thoughts on the book, when we discover that Buchmann is Pedro Gouveia and everything it entails, Ângela’s story and Barata dos Reis’s death, it all felt like too much information and to be honest it kept me hooked however a little confused, like I said in the title it felt like a fever dream inside of another fever dream.
Lastly, my question is what do you think of the lives being lived by Buchmann/Gouveia? Which one would you consider to be his actual life? Is it possible that it is both of them? Why?
“where is the line between our true self and the one we pretend to be?”
Indeed. And I used to like Kurt Vonnegut a lot, and think Mother Night is his best novel. 🙂
Lovely post! I think that Gouveia must be the right answer to your question, which I believe either through intuition or stubbornness to my opinion. However, I do think that Buchmann becomes part of him as well… it becomes a side of Gouveia. Just how we have different versions of ourselves… different social selfs and personas we act up when in different social situaions, Buchmann is just another part of him.