'The Book of Chameleons': Magical realism in Angola

No one is what they seem in Jose Eduardo Agualusa's novel.

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The title of Jose Eduardo Agualusa’s “The Book of Chameleons” may be the most straightforward thing about it. This is indeed a book in which characters transform readily and constantly, right before your startled eyes.

I came to this book knowing nothing about its author and next to nothing about his birthplace, Angola, despite its being a rather large country of some 35 million, along the southwestern coast of Africa. So how did I end up reading “The Book of Chameleons?” Well. In my year of reading more globally, Angola was next on my list of countries. I did a Google search for Angolan authors. Then I plugged their names into my local library’s online catalog. This book was the first hit I got.

The Booker Prizes describe Agualusa as “one of the leading literary voices in Angola and the Portuguese-speaking world.” His books have won the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize — he was the first African-born author to receive the latter award.

In “The Book of Chameleons,” he pays tribute to another illustrious author, Jorge Luis Borges, telling the book’s translator, Daniel Hahn, “It’s a game that I hope Borges would have appreciated.”

The game starts early on, when the book’s narrator drops a revelation about his identity. Then we meet the other main character, Felix Ventura, whose trade is helping people change their genealogical colors by providing them with new pasts.

Take a client identified only as “the minister,” whom Agualusa describes thusly:

A short, fat man, ill at ease in his body. To watch him you’d think he’d been shortened only moments earlier and hadn’t yet become accustomed to his new height…

Felix told him to make himself at home — wouldn’t he like to take off his jacket, perhaps? The minister accepted. In his shirtsleeves he looked even fatter, even shorter, as though God had carelessly sat down on his head.

The minister, it seems, has decided that his ancestors do not live up to his status. Felix presents a more exalted family tree, complete with supporting documents, and his client is satisfied:

So I’m descended from Salvador Correia — caramba! — and I never knew it till now. Excellent. My wife will be ever so pleased.

While reading this book I spent some time learning about Angola. Agualusa told his translator, Daniel Hahn, that the action is set “at a particularly interesting moment in Angola’s history.” The country is pivoting: to peace, to oil wealth, to a market economy. The author says of Angolans in this time period:

They often have real need of a new past as they seek their place in the future, and in the context of Angola there are plenty of people who can pay — and are prepared to pay — to get one.

The book is set in the Angolan capital, Luanda, which I now know was once considered “the Paris of Africa.” Agualusa offers a different perspective:

It’s a fairground of lunatics, this city … Don’t take anything they tell you too seriously. Actually, let me give you a piece of advice — don’t take anybody seriously.

In its focus on personal transformation, “The Book of Chameleons” explores what we yearn for, what we wish to hide, what we can achieve, what we seek to avenge, and what we choose in life’s split-second-decision moments. It explores the human condition.