| Through the Eyes of a Gecko |
December 6, 2008 -- Jose Eduardo Agualusa's novel, The Book Of Chameleons, is the first I've read by this Angolan born writer. I loved it so much I will definitely read his earlier ones, including Creole and My Father's Wives. Agualusa is an original and imaginative storyteller, with lovely lines of description, such as "[he] ate with a glowing appetite, as though he weren't tasting the firm flesh of the snapper but its whole life, the years and years slipping between the sudden explosions of a shoal, the whirling of the waters, the thick strands of light that on sunny evenings fall straight down into the blue abyss", and with tossed-in nuggets of observation that took my breath away -- or made me laugh out loud -- with their acuity.
In this novel, a gecko is the narrator. In a previous life he was a man hauntingly similar to Jorge Luis Borges. In his present form of gecko-ness he attempts to understand his past life by exploiting his present qualities of observation and understanding; he is wiser as a gecko but only because he uses what he learned as a man with what he sees as a gecko to draw astute conclusions about life and love. "The greatest sin is to never have loved" he says at one point, quoting another but now the wisdom for himself. He then proceeds to tell us a story about the cost of love, through dreams and long, lovely ( and some brutal) moments of past and present.
The book is about memory and responsibility, and how we rework our memories to rework our sense of responsibility, either taking on more or less, but rarely the true measure. We create false memories to take on guilt, or absolve ourselves of guilt, or to shield ourselves from what is too painful to admit. And what is a real memory anyway? Who can verify it? Two characters in the book seek to document memories through photographs, one of the dark (war and other horrors) and one of the light (clouds and sky and sunlight off water). When faced with a question of identity (is the President real or a double, a fake?), they seek verification through old newsreels; was he left-handed or right-handed?
And yet the main character is a creator of memories. Felix Ventura is the owner of the house in which the gecko lives, and magnet for the two photographers, who are fated to meet. One of them comes to him, as many people come to him, in search of a new past. Most seek a grander pedigree and he offers them a full lineage, complete with photos and documents to prove they've descended from a great Portuguese leader or from an ancient Angolan clan. The war photographer only wants to wipe his own past completely away, replaced in full by one provided by Ventura and which the photographer takes on maniacally as his own. The novel moves out of its intoxicating and dreamlike pace when the true identity of the war photographer and his relationship to the photographer of light is revealed, and the desire for revenge comes out as the true reason he wanted a new past from Ventura.
In addition to being a meditation on memory and love and responsibility and also a tautly drawn mystery, this book is also a paean to literature. The gecko recalls how in his earlier life he wanted to commit suicide. He bought himself a gun, a bottle of gin, and a crime novel: "I thought that the gin, in combination with the tedium of a pointless plot, would give me the courage to put the gun to my head and pull the trigger." But then the book turns out to be not "bad at all" and he keeps reading to the last page, the falls asleep, and never kills himself. Saved by a book. And there are frequent and reverent references to great writers like Jorge Amado, Camilo Sesto, Borges, Coetzee ("despair totally free of self-indulgence"), and Eca de Querioz.
Some good lines from The Book of Chameleons:
"I still shudder each time I hear someone say "duvet," a repulsive gallicism, rather than 'eiderdown', which to me seems to be a very lovely, rather noble word. But I've resigned myself to 'brassiere.' 'Strophium' has a sort of historical dignity about it, but it still sounds a little odd -- don't you think?" And yes, "strophium" means a band of cloth or leather to support the breasts. I bet you didn't know that!
And, in writing about emails, Agualusa has a character say (in an email) "I always feel horror, physical horror, metaphysical and moral horror, when I see that 'Hi!' -- how can we possibly take seriously anyone who addresses us like that?" versus letters: "I feel a flicker of nostalgia for those days, when the postman used to bring out letters to the house, and we were glad, surprised to see what we'd received, what we opened and read, and at the care we took when we replied, choosing each word, weighing it up, assessing its light, feeling its fragrance, because we know that every word would later be weighed up, studied, smelled, tasted, and that some might even escape the maelstrom of time, to be reread many years later."
This book was written with such care and can be read again and again, now and in the future. The Book of Chameleons is a gem of writing.
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