What would happen if we could buy ourselves a brand new past? We could whitewash our genealogy and get rid of anything embarrassing, but we might also end up obsessed with a new life we haven’t lived. José Eduardo Agualusa’s books tend to originate from unusual, crazy, and profound jumping off points like this, to offer new perspectives on the African context and his native Angola. Identity and memory, dreams and scars, which formed the foundations of books like Creole (Arcadia Books, 2002) or A General Theory of Oblivion (Archipelago, 2015), are also present in The Book of Chameleons (Simon & Schuster, 2008). The main character in this satire, a merchant who offers false pasts to the Angolan elite, lets Agualusa reflect on how our collective identity can be based on invented stories, and on how literature is the quintessential space of freedom. Agualusa continues in this vein with Mestre dos Batuques [The Master of the Drums] (2025), a new novel that once again blends reality, history, and magic through his distinctive narrative voice.

José Eduardo Agualusa returns to Kosmopolis to talk with the translator of his work into Catalan, Pere Comellas, in collaboration with Catalan PEN and the Instituto Camões.