Chameleons have sticky-licky tongues, cone-shaped eyes that move independently, and bodies that change color based on their mood. Through nine sections built of vignettes drawn from history and imagination, A Life in Chameleons traces the life of Italian quick-change artist Leopold Fregoli (1867-1936), also known as Il Camaleonte (the chameleon), who specialized in appearing as someone other than himself. The result is a captivating demonstration of all of Fregoli’s ingenuity. It is a risk to render an actual life in such an experimental form, but Schwartz succeeds marvelously. This book is a gem, full of story and substance.

Because he is a quick-change artist, Fregoli can shift identities at a darting, lizard speed. Early in his stage career, critics suspect he couldn’t possibly be all those characters he performs. Throughout the book, his insistent voice proclaims: “IT IS ME ALWAYS ME ONLY ME.”

It is always only him, and Fregoli takes center stage—but never as himself. He loves to shock and to surprise. He’s fun. He’s maddening. He’s a vaudeville charm, a sad Pagliaccio. Selby takes us into Fregoli’s experience of living as a performance artist: “The main habitat of a chameleon is the centre of a circle of light.” The light both illuminates and eliminates, erasing his gender and age while highlighting his changeability of character.

It takes infrastructure to illuminate change. Fregoli has support in backstage dressers, who make faster-than-light costume changes: “Twenty-three dressers went everywhere with him, peeling off his skirts as he ran past, snatching his hats as they fell.” Fregoli moves fast over great distances too, slipping from Rome to Livorno to perform at the Eden Theatre. Livorno becomes his home base; it provides stability, income, and a house. Fregoli also nabs a seamstress named Velia who soon becomes his wife, because she can sew all his costumes.

With the introduction of Velia, the story’s rhythm becomes clipped. There are multiple literary and dramatic allusions, a reference to Mussolini’s black shirts, and a foreshadow of death:

Velia was a girl he met in Livorno. She could sew. He married her.

When Velia was still a girl, Livorno was still a beautiful city. It was the sort of place Byron and Shelley wanted to go on vacation. There was electricity in the street lamps, and you could swim in the sea. The fascists hadn’t occupied the theatres yet.

Shelley, who is well known for drowning in the sea, was trying to get home to Livorno, to Mary Shelley. But she outlived him.

Fregoli may be a creative spirit, but in practical terms, he’s a pretentious jerk, “the kind of man who named his house after his wife.” In Livorno the two—house and woman—blur, but ultimately the long-suffering Velia has the last word:

Velia bowed her head over sewing the last tiny seam in the best suit of Fregoli.

A life, then.

A life in all its chameleons, everyone watching while it changes.

Soon Fregoli begins to act in films and to direct them, too. He makes the film Ermete Novelli reads the newspaper in which “Ermete Novelli just reads the newspaper.” He “sits in his garden. Nothing happens.” Italians may look like they live fast, but a lot of nothing gets done. Off screen, in real life, Fregoli slows down, joining the pace of Italian life:

Fregoli drove out to Viareggio where the sea stretched out under the sky.

Nothing at all was happening in Viareggio.

People sat on their terraces and closed their eyes in the sunshine.

And yet, Fregoli continues to make time move: “Fregoli was twenty-nine years old and multiplying himself across innumerable picture postcards.” Fregoli sprouts on racks of postcards: the ballerina, the solider, the tenor, the gardener, the policeman: all Fregoli. “Fregoli was in every way affable, charming, congenial. But he was also ruthlessly mutable,” writes Schwartz. But those who make deals with chameleons should be careful, Schwartz suggests, because “[i]t was rare that when Fregoli played a game with men he did not win.” 

History in literature can be a kind of re-enchantment, a magic that renders the reader ravenous for more. Fortunately Schwartz includes a six-page bibliography showing the breadth and depth of her research, ranging from the contemporary dance historian Clare Croft to Loïe Fuller’s autobiography, published in English in 1913 as Fifteen Years a Dancer’s Life, to the archival film collection at the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome. In this magical book, Schwartz animates Fregoli’s historical biography, making it a re-enactment, a performance. A Life in Chameleons highlights Schwartz’s dexterity with craft; it is both an experiment in form and a celebration of possibility.

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Selby Wynn Schwartz is the author of After Sappho (Galley Beggar, 2022), which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for both the Orwell Prize in Political Fiction and the James Tait Black Prize in Fiction. Her first book, The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives (University of Michigan Press, 2019), won the Sally Banes Prize from the American Society of Theatre Research.

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Before she became a writer, Renée E. D’Aoust was a dancer. Her memoir-in-essays, Body of a Dancer, was published in 2011 by Etruscan Press. D’Aoust teaches online at North Idaho College and Casper College. Her adopted dog looks like a very tiny Phyllis Diller and is named Zoë.