In an EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW with Agualusa, I asked:
The Book of Chameleons has been favorably compared to others of ‘magical realism’. Do you think this is true and if so, please discuss magical realism and how it applies to your book or your writing in general.
Agualusa responded:
English-language critics have classified this book as standing close to so-called ‘magic realism’. But in Portugal, Brazil, Spain, and even in France, I’ve never been asked this question so persistently. It’s true that the Latin American writers were very important to my development. Cubans, Colombians, and some Brazilians, such as Jorge Amado, move in a universe that is very close to my own. They are Afro-Latin Creole universes where the real is hard to distinguish from the marvellous. In Luanda you will find that fishermen -- and the population as a whole -- believe in mermaids, and so communicate with them just as naturally as in the middle ages Europeans communicated with angels, or mermaids too. You just have to read the accounts from that time.
In 1570 Antonio de Torqemada published in Salamanca The Garden of Curious Flowers, a collection of wonders that influenced Cervantes. Among the witches, fairies and geographical oddities there is room too for mermaids. He says: “People often speak of these mermaids, saying that the upper half of the body has the shape of a woman, and the lower half that of a fish; represented with a comb in one hand and a mirror in the other; it is said that they sing so sweetly that they put the sailors to sleep and then they can board the ships and kill everyone sleeping.” And later, “While this is so, and there are fish of this kind in the sea, I hold the sweetness of their singing and everything else said about them to be just a fable.” That is, very sensibly Torquemada doesn’t question the existence of mermaids, only the quality of their singing. So to respond to your question, I try merely to explore in a literary way the possibilities that reality offers me.
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