RMST 202

    The book of chameleons was one of the most bizarre books that we have read this term. It was a quickish read but was extremely confusing and I still don’t think I really understand the full extent of the novel. The story centres around an albino man living in Angola named Felix Ventura. Felix is a master of creating new identities, and along with being a bookseller, he forges alternate false histories for anyone with means to access his services. In the time of the novel Angola has recently had an escalation of the civil war and people want to be on the right side of history with status. Felix invents whole genealogies and and pasts, providing his clients with documents and photographs to obtain some level of status in the post-war nation. The story is narrated by Eulalio, a gecko who lives in Felix’s house. Throughout the text, the author treats Felix like a real person, personifying interactions with him and thinking and dreaming about life together. Through reading the ...

This book was a really great read, and gave some really good insight into what the 1960s were like in Argentina and Uruguay. One of the main draws of the novel is the bizarre writing style by the author which claims to use true facts and references to tell the story. That being said, with any event such as this, there are bound to be differing perspectives and takes on the story, along with possible embellishment by the author to tell a more compelling story. Personally, I was constantly trying to guess how much I could trust the author, and whether I should really trust anything at all that was being said. While there seemed to be a high level of fact checking and referencing within the text, much of the novel was so largely outlandish that it seemed impossible to really gather whether the author was really getting an unbiased perspective. This narrative style really harkened back to reading The Da Vinci Code, admittedly a horrible book, which alleged to tell some level of truth amids...

This book was really cool but also very bizarre and certainly very thought provoking. It was very hard to read and really made me constantly confused, though I still enjoyed it in the end. The author isn’t the best, and the writing style was often hard to read and sometimes just plain bad. That being said, I think the erratic and poor writing added to the sense of anxiety and confusion present throughout the novel. I was constantly rereading sentences to make sure that I had gotten the full idea. The book primarily centres on the lives of a three couples living in communist Romania. Two of the couples travel to a dinner party with a very manipulative host (the third couple) who seems dead set on gaining more power and using it to gain all that he possibly can. According to the perspective of the novel, these small luxuries are very hard to come by in Romania and the host is seemingly revered for having them. Once the couples get to the dinner party, they are initially greatly impressed...

                      This novel was really hard to read even in its brevity, and certainly left me with more questions than answers. The book was brutal, lacking any real resolution as Macabéa’s life spirals out of control. The fragmented style of the novel adds to this sense of desperation experienced by Macabéa within the novel. The presence of a narrator also adds to the novel, the narrator even openly admitting that the lack of knowledge they have about the story is troubling. The narrator doesn’t even identity Macabéa’s name until more than halfway through the novel. This novel revels in the mundane, there isn’t a particularly complex narrative and the novel lacks a clear beginning middle and end.                     In a brief over-simplified summary, Macabéa is a poor young woman living in Ri...