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The Luanda of The Book of Chameleons

In a crumbling house in Luanda, Félix Ventura makes his living selling invented pasts and distinguished genealogies to Angola's new bourgeoisie, watched over by the narrator, a gecko on the wall who was once a man. When a stranger buys a whole new identity, the fabricated past collides with the real, violent history of the civil war. Agualusa sets his sly, dreamlike novel in the real Luanda: the decaying villa, the city of the newly powerful, and the buried wartime crimes that surface through the lies.

Author
José Eduardo Agualusa, 2004
Places
5

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The dealer in pasts0% in
Félix Ventura

Félix Ventura's house

The dealer in pasts

Map of Félix Ventura's house today
Luanda today

In his book-lined, decaying house in Luanda, the albino Félix Ventura receives the clients for whom he invents distinguished ancestries and glorious pasts. The villa, with the gecko Eulálio watching from the wall, is the still stage on which the whole sly comedy of manufactured memory plays out.

The opening chapters

inspired byAlmost the whole novel unfolds in Félix Ventura's crumbling house in Luanda; the villa is drawn from the decaying colonial houses of the city and sited there.

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The bourgeoisie25% in
Eulálio

The city of new pasts

The bourgeoisie

Map of The city of new pasts today
Luanda today

Beyond the house lies the Luanda of the new elite, the ministers and businessmen who can afford to buy themselves a nobler history now that the old one is best forgotten. Through the gecko's ironic eye, Agualusa turns the whole postwar city into a place remaking its own past, where invention and forgetting are the price of respectability.

The Luanda chapters

explicitFélix's clients are drawn from Luanda's newly powerful, the ministers, generals and businessmen of postwar Angola; the city of the new bourgeoisie is the real Luanda.

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The stranger50% in
José Buchmann

The bought past

The stranger

Map of The bought past today
Luanda today

A mysterious foreigner buys a whole new self and becomes José Buchmann, a photographer with a fabricated family and homeland he then travels to seek out. As the invented past takes on a life of its own, the novel asks how far a person is simply the story they tell, a question that turns steadily darker.

The José Buchmann chapters

inspired byA stranger commissions a complete new identity, becoming the photographer José Buchmann and setting out to inhabit the invented life; the enterprise is sited in Félix's Luanda world.

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The reckoning75% in
Ângela Lúcia

The buried crime

The reckoning

Map of The buried crime today
Luanda today

As the photographer Ângela Lúcia enters Félix's life and Buchmann tracks down the man in his manufactured story, a real crime from the war years rises to the surface. Beneath the playful fictions Agualusa sets a country's unhealed violence, the murders and betrayals that no amount of bought respectability can erase.

The later chapters

inferredThe real, violent history of the civil war surfaces through the photographer Ângela Lúcia and a killing that the invented pasts cannot cover; sited in the Luanda of the novel.

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The ending100% in
Eulálio

The gecko's dreams

The ending

Map of The gecko's dreams today
Luanda today

Between the comings and goings of the house, the gecko Eulálio dreams of the man he once was, until his story and Félix's quietly converge. Agualusa closes on reincarnation, forgiveness and the strange consolations of a life remembered, giving his fable of lies a tender, unexpected heart.

The ending

inspired byThe gecko narrator Eulálio, a soul reborn, dreams of his former human life between the events of the house; his dreaming is sited at Félix's Luanda villa.

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