The Book of Chameleons, Jose Eduardo Agualusa
Condition: GOOD
Weight: 218g
Paperback
ISBN: 1905147651
Translated from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
WINNER OF THE INDEPENDENT FOREIGN FICTION PRIZE 2007
From the back cover:
It is quite some pages into The Book of Chameleons before you realise the narrator – rather charming, witty as he is – is a lizard. A very articulate, and very friendly lizard, and – like all Agualusa’s narrators – unusually perceptive. But a lizard nonetheless. This narrator lives on Felix Ventura’s living room wall; Felix, the lizard’s friend and hero of our story, is a man who sells pasts – if you don’t like yours, he can come up with an entirely new one for you, a new past – full of better memories, with a complete lineage (as distinguished as you like), photos and all. This is a book about the landscape of memory and its inconsistencies and randomness, about how we can remember things that never happened with extraordinary vividness, and forget things that did.
‘Fierce originality, vindicating the power of creativity to transform the most sinister acts. Not since Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis have we had such a convincing non-human narrator, bought vividly home to us by Daniel Hahn’ - Amanda Hopkinson, Independent
‘Strange, elliptical, charming’ - Guardian
‘A poetic, beguiling meditation on truth and storytelling and a political thriller and wholly satisfying murder mystery’ - New Internationalist Books of the Year
‘Humourous and quizzical, with a light touch on weighty themes, the narrative darts about with lizard-like colour and velocity’ - Boyd Tonkin, Independent
