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.

Félix Ventura

Félix Ventura's house

The dealer in pasts

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 by Almost 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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