OBOC - Angola

For Angola I stumbled upon Jose Agualusa's "The Book of Chameleons" and it was a fascinating book. Set in the early 1990s in Angola, just after the end of a long-drawn civil war, it is the time in Angola when new wealth was being discovered. So there is the contention between new money and the elite-portugese speaking old money. The leveller being, now everyone with money wants and can finally afford a glorious past.


That's where Felix Ventura comes in with his promise to "Guarantee your children a better past". He specializes in inventing to the minutest detail a glorious past for anyone in need of one. An albino who lives by himself, well almost... he has a gecko as his companion, he has the uncanny ability to spin a tale about the past that he doesnt have to get into forging documents to guarantee it.

The gecko is more than just a house pet, it is the reincarnation of Borges (for whom the author has huge admiration), and besides being the narrator of the incidents in the house he also constantly recalls his past lives as a human. He interacts with Felix through the common dreams they both share. Besides the dreams, they also share an aversion to light, and ironically the two people who change their lives forever are both photographers with a passion for light. Who are these two strangers? Are they connected? What part of their memories are real?

The book in the end is about memories both real and fictional. At one point the Gecko says that "Memory is a landscape watched from the window of a moving train". There is a great chapter where Felix recounts his childhood to the Gecko and that chapter is so poetic with vivid descriptions of the Angolan landscape complete with Locusts, Red Ants, White Ants, Butterflies and the first rain and a heaven full of chickens. I loved the writing in that chapter, and despite being well acquainted with Felix by then i still fell for it and needed the Gecko to remind me not to trust him :) " I envy him his childhood. Maybe it is not real. But I envy it all the same" says the Gecko. That was an interesting aspect of the book - discerning which parts are real and which are not.

I guess we all have selective memories and remember things the way we want them, maybe not really lying but definitely exaggerating, embellishing and downplaying as we see it fit. Felix is more professional than many of us.

Overall a great book, i think the translator must've done a fabulous job. The appendix has an interview with the author which helped give some perspective. I was unfamiliar with Broges until i read this interview. A quick read about him in Wikipedia helped me understand the perspective of the Gecko a bit.

There is an interesting piece of advice which the Gecko received from its mother in its human life... "You can find everything that exists in the world in books - sometimes in truer colors and without the real pain of everything that really does exist. Given a choice between life and books my son you must choose books". Made me wonder if i was trying to do just that with the OBOC project ? :)