So, this was the book I could find in my library, for the Africa Lusaphone challenge. It's short, literary, narrated by a gecko who somehow represents Jorge Luis Borges. The gecko is telling the story of an Angolan who makes a living selling fake family histories to people who want a more upscale genealogy.

Now that I have read it, I remember reading someone else's review, here on LT, and thinking that it sounded too strange and literary for me, so I would skip it. It turns out that was right, but it is very well written, so if you are more literary than me, or a Borges fan, I bet you'd like it. ( )

Narrated by the Chameleon we are witness to a maker of improved pasts and a client who needs an entirely new identity but still is entangled in his own past in Angola's struggle for independence. Strange but not off-putting. ( )

I felt like I was in the middle of some vague but meaningful dream the entire time I was reading this book. The story is told through a series of vignettes from the perspective of a gecko, which sounds less satisfying than it actually was. ( )

This unusual book is narrated by a gecko who lives on the walls and ceilings of the home of Felix, an albino. Felix is in the business of providing new identities and backgrounds for people who have something to hide, or who otherwise wish to escape their past. The plot revolves around Jose, one of his customers, and Estella, a beautiful young woman with whom Felix begins a relationship, but who has had a troubled past. In the afterword, the author states that many of the gecko's memories are based on the life of Jorge Luis Borges. He describes the book as being about memory and its traps, and about the construction of our identities. I loved this thought, expressed by the gecko:

"Memory is a landscape watched from the window of a moving train...things happen before our very eyes, we know them to be real, but they're so far away we can't touch them. Some are so far, so very far away, and the train moving so fast, that we can't be sure any longer that they really did happen. Maybe we merely dreamed them?" ( )

This is the story of Félix Ventura who sells memories and backgrounds to people who need a solid lineage to become fully realized in life, narrated by the gecko who makes its home in the shady cracks in the walls of Félix's house. Set in Luanda, Angola, right at the end of the civil war, the story is an interesting mix of politics and Borgesque fantasy, along with seriously original characters. It is a fairly thin book, consisting of a series of short vignettes, but its sum total is an engaging discourse on the nature of truth and lies and how a modified identity and memory could change the course of one's life. The narrator, Eulálio the gecko, is a sardonic observer of Félix's life, but his dreams are wistful views into his alternate, pre-gecko existence, which makes for one of the most interesting narrators I've read in a long while. Don't come looking for a chameleon to play a huge part - it's metaphorical - and the original title, O Vendedor de Passados, means "The Seller of Pasts" rather than having to do with anything lacertilian. Also, if you know your Jorge Luis Borges, you'll notice that the gecko and he has quite a lot in common... ( )