“Humorous and quizzical, with a light touch on weighty themes, the narrative darts about with lizard-like colour and velocity” – The Independent
Born in 1960, José Eduardo Agualusa grew up in Angola, moving to Lisbon in 1975 to study and begin his writing career. Angolan fiction is completely new to me and The Book of Chameleons is certainly a revelatory read from a prolific novelist with a voice of “fierce originality”. His novels have been championed by talented translator Daniel Hahn, who has so far brought a handful of them to us in English. Agualusa takes on themes including the trauma of civil war, (in this case, obliquely) but also memory, exile, love – and light:
“Sometimes, she said, she could recognise a place just by the quality of the light. In Lisbon, the light at the end of spring leans madly over the houses, white and humid, and just a little bit salty. In Rio de Janeiro, in the season that the carioca locals instinctively call autumn, and that the Europeans insist disdainfully is just a figment of their imagination, the light becomes gentler, like a shimmer of silk, sometimes accompanied by a humid greyness, which hangs over the streets, and then sinks down gently into the squares and gardens. In the drenched land of the Pantanal, in Mato Grosso, really early in the morning, the blue parrots cross the sky and they shake a clear, slow light from their wings, a light that little by little settles on the waters, grows and spreads and seems to sing.”
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