Customer Reviews

The Double

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

From the day I discovered BLINDNESS, I have been a great fan of Jose Saramago's work: THE STONE RAFT, THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS CHRIST, and THE CAVE to mention a few. I picked up THE DOUBLE with eager anticipation and was not disappointed. The pacing is slow and deliberate, the sentences long and convoluted in typically Saramagian style, but this is a book that I simply did not want to put down. Every time I planned to use a chapter ending as a break point in my reading, my eyes continued on almost involuntarily to the next page, my mind not yet ready to let go of the story.

THE DOUBLE's story line is simple, the cast of characters relatively limited. Tertuliana Maximo Afonso is the most ordinary of ordinary history teachers, a divorced, middle-aged man living a stagnant existence: friendless, cautious to the point of near paralysis, afraid of commitment to an inexplicably-attached girlfriend, and overly attached to his own mother. Then one evening, following the recommendation of a fellow teacher, he watches a rented video and sees a minor actor who is a virtual duplicate of himself as he looked five years earlier, when the movie was made.

With this cinematic revelation of a double, Tertuliano Maximo's world is turned upside down. He begins a comically academic process of investigation, even co-opting his girlfriend Maria da Paz into participating while refusing to reveal the reason. The more he learns about his double, the more shocked he is by their clone-like sameness, down to the matching scars on their knees. Once he learns the other man's true name and address, Maximo cannot resist making contact. Upon discovering their identicalness extends even to birth dates and fingerprints, they are joined in a battle for primogeniture, for the right to exist and occupy the one single place Nature intended for just one human entity, at the unavoidable expense of the other. The consequences are both amusing and tragic, concluding with a surprise twist.

It is tempting to consider THE DOUBLE as Saramago's riff on cloning, but such an interpretation seems overly literal and a bit too facile. Instead, the book can be seen as a modern tale of personal identity: who we think we are, who we portray ourselves to be, and who we really are (or if we can ever even discover that).

Once, double lives were the exclusive province of movie stars and politicians, those who necessarily adopted public personas often far different from their private lives. Today, we have ordinary people taking on new identities courtesy of reality television programs. Thanks to the Internet, we can try on and cast off personalities as easily as changing shirts: projecting chosen identities in chat rooms and via instant messaging, living them out as avatars in simulated life games like The Sims, or portraying ourselves as we wish to be seen on personal web pages. In an Internet world, we can be several people simultaneously. Those who "see" us may have no idea who we really are. After a while, we may not even be sure ourselves which identity is the real "us."

In THE DOUBLE, Saramago pries open the lid on modern identity to examine the consequences of a world in which we can be so easily heard without being seen, where we can represent ourselves to be virtually anything we choose to be. It is no accident that Tertuliano Maximo's doppelganger has a successful career as a supporting actor in movies, appearing in one as a waiter, in another as a hotel receptionist, in still others as a croupier, a dance teacher, a theater impresario. Nor is it a matter of chance that Tertuliano Maximo is a teacher of ancient history, a reader about Mesopotamia, burdened by a laughably outmoded first name and an equally out-of-date automobile, so technophobic he is clueless about how to use a computer. Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is no longer a serviceable identity - it's time to discard it for a newer and better one.

For those unfamiliar with Jose Saramago's work, do not be put off in the first twenty pages by his writing style. His prose is full of involutions and convolutions, turning in on itself playfully and wandering about self-reflexively, revealing wry commentaries and sardonic humor along the way. Saramago's writing is meant to be savored like a fine wine, swirled about the mind and appreciated the way we appreciate the brushstrokes of a master oil painter. The result is magical, more than worth the effort. This is a masterful work from a master writer and deserving Nobelist.

Since THE DOUBLE was my first Jose Saramago book, it was eagerly anticipated. I had heard high praise about THE CAVE. The author's name had been mentioned in some surprising circles. So I'm not sure what I expected here. What I got was a book like no other --- in some ways incredible, in other ways bewildering.

Just the lead character's name, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, strikes a discordant note from the beginning. And Saramago rarely uses less than all three names, and almost never uses the pronoun. He emphasizes the name's rarity first, among many instances, when Tertuliano Maximo Afonso has to identify himself for the clerk at a video rental store. He rents a video from this previously mentioned clerk at the suggestion of a teacher of mathematics at the school where he, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, teaches history. The video is unremarkable but for one aspect: A supporting actor with barely a speaking part is identical in appearance to Tertuliano Maximo Afonso. Identical.

Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, recently depressed and lethargic --- too depressed and lethargic to extricate himself from a lackluster relationship with long-time paramour Maria da Paz --- discovers a renewed purpose to his days. He embarks on a mission to locate this actor with his face. He muses whether identical looks (right down to years-old scars and mole placements) means identical times of death. He muses about other things, too. In fact, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso muses, it seems, all day long.

Engulfed in his quest for at least a glimpse of his double, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso neglects not only Maria da Paz, who is recently asking some hard questions, but his mother as well, who is also asking some hard questions, just not the same ones. Tertuliano Maximo Afonso's obsession leads him to neglect most areas of his life that do not involve the actor. He may, it turns out, have taken his mission too far.

This is a book to pay attention to. While at first Saramago's style may be off-putting to some (a spectacularly run-on sentence may go on for a full page; paragraphs may go on for three, no quotation marks are used, very few speaker tags, and you will never see a dash or an interrogatory), it brazenly dares the reader to look beyond proper grammatical conventions and simply read the message. It defies all the rules. Saramago has a rhythm to his writing that, once you have it, propels you into the story with enthusiastic speed. THE DOUBLE provides excellent fodder for provoking thought. It is perplexing, comical, even absurd. A guaranteed head shaker.

--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers

"Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine - they are the life, the soul of reading." - Laurence Sterne.
Believing the above statement to be true would really help a reader enjoy Saramago and I happen to be one of the believers. I cannot think of an author who uses the device of digression moreso than Saramago. For me, the near-constant philosophizing of the narrator and the characters is one of the things that I love the most about his work. This is the fifth Saramago book I have read and it has helped me arrive at the conclusion that he is my favorite living author.
There is no point in my re-stating the plot or storyline because the amazon page itself (above) really provides a perfect synopsis. So do the fine reviews that follow mine here on this page. But here is the one thing that I would ask the prospective reader to ponder...
What would it be like to suddenly find that there is another person in the world that is exactly like you, in every respect? Another YOU! A double. A doppelganger.
In its psychological twistings and turnings and in a writing style that is as wonderful and coherent as it is inimitable and unorthodox, this is the very question that Saramago brings the reader FACE to FACE with!
My initial answer to the question was "Hmmm, no big deal. So what? I have a double. Who cares?" With The Double, Saramago has now blown the lid off of such an easy answer. Sure, the book is not ABOUT me or you, but in Tertuliano Maximo we see shades of who we all are. And the thoughtful (and patient) reader will find that they are drawn into a vortex of identity trauma along with the protagonist himself.
Who AM I, if there is another me?
Be patient with the book, especially if you are new to Jose Saramago... give it time, you will be rewarded. Stick with the convolutions and dialogues with "common sense"... the absolutely crazy ending is worth it all.
Saramago. What can one say? He is the literature teacher's worst nightmare! He does not even use "proper" punctuation. Most conventional rules of writing are thrown to the wind. Like one reviewer noted, J.S. even tells you ahead of time what is going to happen to his characters later on in the story. It is crazy.
Is The Double a good book to start with if you are new to Saramago? Not really, in my opinion. The Cave, or Blindness, would be a better pier to jump off of.
But jump. Do it.
Swim with a partner, if need be.
T.y.L.i.I.

In what may be Jose Saramago's most playful novel, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a secondary school history teacher, views a film and is stunned to discover an actor who looks exactly like him in every respect. "One of us is a mistake," he declares, and as he begins (typically) to overanalyze the fact that "never before in the history of humanity have two identical people existed in the same place and time," he finds himself wondering what it would be like to discover and meet this double.

Renting dozens of videos in an effort to identify the look-alike actor he saw in the film, Tertuliano finds his life transformed--"as if he were...in a corridor joining heaven and hell," and he wonders "where he had come from and where he would go to next." Enlisting his girlfriend, Maria da Paz, to help him find the address of actor Daniel Santa Clara, without telling her the whole story about his double, he learns that the actor's real name is Antonio Claro, contacts him by telephone, and arranges to meet him at a remote place, where a series of profound, dramatic ironies unfolds.

Telling Tertuliano's story is a bold and quirky narrator. Self-conscious about his writing, the narrator digresses, acts patronizing toward Tertuliano, and often makes arch comments about him to the reader. He manipulates the reader, jokes with him as he constructs Tertuliano's story, plays with logic and language, creates conversations and debates between Tertuliano and Common Sense, reflects on the origins and destinies of words, and generally shows off, acting as a foil for Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, whose own "emotions have never been strong or enduring."

Saramago raises serious questions about identity and destiny, presenting Tertuliano Maximo Afonso and Antonio Claro (Daniel Santa Clara) as they compare their lives, recognize their different approaches to life, and then find their natural curiosity becoming transformed into resentment. "There is one too many of us in the world," Tertuliano declares. The climax is shocking--quite different from what the reader expects--and just when you think the surprises have ended, a final surprise awaits.

Readers new to Saramago should be forewarned that his style can be off-putting--page after page of run-on sentences, few paragraphs indentations, and a lack of quotation marks. The reader must read dialogue carefully, since there is no punctuation to set off which remarks are made by which character. Despite this flouting of convention, however, Saramago achieves a remarkably conversational tone, and this often humorous novel reads quickly. Lively and clever, The Double gives us the game of life, played with a whole new set of rules. Mary Whipple

I always start a new Jose Saramago novel with a sense of excitement. The 1998 Nobel-Prize winner's DOUBLE is about identity, both literal and symbolic. THE DOUBLE tells the story of an ordinary history teacher employed in a secondary school, Tertuliano Maxim Afonso, who discovers his double "in every respect" (p. 191), while watching a rental video, "The Race is to the Swift." Afonso is divorced, depressed, indifferent, and inattentive in his mundane existence. "If we're not careful," he has learned, "life can quickly become predictable, monotonous, a drag" (p. 80). However, the discovery of his "spitting image," a minor actor in the video, Daniel Santa-Clara, awakens Afonso from his pathetic existence, and leads him on an obsessive quest to discover his double image, while hiding his efforts from his coworkers, his lover, Maria da Paz, and even his mother. While his project leads Afonso out of his boring life, it ultimately results in identity issues with his depraved double involving sex and power. THE DOUBLE is ultimately about what makes each person unique, despite the possibility that one may share an identical physical appearance with another. Like the Portugese novelist's other books, THE DOUBLE requires the reader's full attention to follow the stream-of-consciousness narrative. And while this meandering novel may not measure up to Saramago's previous standards set by BLINDNESS and THE CAVE, it nevertheless provides a compelling reading experience.

G. Merritt

Saramago's "The Double" is a beautifully worded and somewhat experimental novel that truly earns the title true literature. In a masterful tale, the author immediately brings the reader into the story, by including him in most of the secrets of the book, in advance of the characters. In several places the author speaks directly to the reader, and is ever conscious of how certain items in his rendition, and the plot twists may appear to the reader.

In an additional artful turn, the use of most periods and quotation marks is dispensed with, leaving the reader to mentally insert them in the appropriate places. Periods are rare, and paragraphs are rarer. Chapters are lengthy, but not in anyway boring, more knuckle whitening, if anything. And the author comments to the reader on anomalies and potential paths for which the plot may proceed.

But at the core of the story is an identity crisis; one of the most extreme variety. Not only does our protagonist have a problem with his own identity in a psychological manner. He actually has a problem with his identity in a physical manner. He discovers, virtually by accident, that he has an identical double within the same city limits as he himself lives.

To compound the dilemma, Saramago makes the "double" an actor. He makes him a person who takes on the character and personality of other people, and sometimes perhaps, may not have a personality of their own. They may in fact be identical in character; they may in fact be the same person. If they are, is one of them superfluous? This is the question Saramago poses. And within it all, are the inevitable, and in fact surreal consequences of the actions that are taken by this discovery of a "double."

It has been said that the act of observation changes the behavior of the observed. In this book, Saramago makes that fact very plain to the reader. And yet, it is something that could happen so easily to anyone, at least seem to happen to anyone. And something that is not easily resolvable.

Saramago speaks on several plains of consciousness throughout the book. The novel is recommended for all readers who enjoy serious modern literature. And for those who have a deep interest in the internal workings of the minds of men, and women. One should not pass up the opportunity to read this book.

Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is a middle-aged, middle school history teacher--an unremarkable, passive and self-absorbed man who is suffering from mild depression, or is it boredom? A colleague suggests he rent a certain movie. A bit player in the movie turns out to look exactly as he does. The history teacher becomes obsessed with this man, ruminates about the nature of identity, and sets out to find this man who looks like him.

Eventually the two men meet, but instead of feeling a kinship or a sense of being brothers they react to each other with suspicion, mistrust and resentment. Their identical appearance is taken to mean that only one of them can be the real person--the other is merely a copy. But which one? The question is explored in long-winded excess by Tertuliano, a man who is pathetically self-absorbed and thinks too much.Meanwhile he neglects and misuses everyone around him.

Thus begins a love-hate (shall we say) relationship that ends in disaster. I will say no more about the plot--you will just have to read the book.

Author Jose Saramago is not for everyone, and this book in particular is not for everyone. As a nobel laureate I suppose he is permitted to break all the rules of novel-writing, and he certainly does. He does not "show" what the characters are thinking and feeling, he "tells" us--in excruciating detail. He constantly intrudes into the action with authorial commentary, laughing at the characters, telling us what is going to happen to them, analyzing their actions, and philosophizing. Some of his thoughts are brilliantly put, but getting at them is hard work. I found this novel unbearably tedious and hard to read until I was half-way through it. In the last half, things began to pick up, and in the last hundred pages, it was hard to put it down.The surprise ending was stunning.

Conclusions: If you're a fan of Saramago you will like it. If you don't mind long Proustian sentences, rambling digressions, page after page without paragraphing, and lengthy dialogues without a single quotation mark--well--this may be just the book for you. I recommend it but not for everyone. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

Não poderíamos esperar algo diferente do autor que, com sua forma uniforme de narrativa, conquistou uma imensa legião de fãs. Injustamente a obra foi criticada por alguns, pois verdade seja dita: o final é espetacular...! Bem no estilo de romances de suspense recheados de intregas e obsessões, o autor nos leva a questionar como poderia ser o encontro com o nosso próprio eu. Recomendo, como sempre.

Imagine meeting someone you are not even related to that is a physical copy of yourself. Mix in some bad decision-making and a lot of errant thinking about how to deal with it, and you've got a mystery. It reminded me a lot of the little half-hour Hitchcock's that we looked forward to every week a few decades ago. There were a lot of twists and turns, a lot of milking of the plot, a lot of talking heads with crackling dialogue, some surprisingly wry 'over-voice' humor, and absolutely no special effects: they were great! Saramago's books have that same flavor except that a lot more time is spent in the heads of the characters.

Saramago is a Nobel Prize winning writer with an unusual and,for me, an irresistible style. His books have a lean-and-mean look about them with run-on sentences almost a page long, paragraphs with no titles or numbers, and no quotation marks. There is frequently some doubt as to who is speaking to whom, because he often doesn't say who's speaking; it could be Saramago, a character, another character speaking with the first character, Common Sense (another character in this book), or someone else. It leaves you with the thought: Who writes this stuff? But once you digest it, you think: But it is really good stuff, and at times, it is pure poetry! This means you don't read Saramago's books as much as work your way through them to reap the rewards.

That's the best I can do to describe his writing style and storytelling. It has to be experienced first hand, and is well worth the effort. As for 'The Double', even Alfred Hitchcock would be proud!

Thanks to most prior reviewers for not revealing too much of the plot. And thanks in particular to the reviewer who quoted Laurence Sterne on digressions as the soul of reading. If you don't share that viewpoint, you may find Saramago's novels hard to take. It may help to realize that in "The Double," as in other novels, Saramago is inviting the reader to indulge him in a rather elaborate joke, one that becomes amusing once you're onto it. He's daring you to choose a point at which you will no longer put up with him and will skip certain passages. He does this with digressions by making them more and more elaborate and the content more and more tangential to the story until you pause and ask yourself, "Do I really need to read this?" When you first skip one, you're in on the joke. The same is true of his abuse of rhetorical devices and other aspects of language to make himself deliberately obscure. I read these novels in the original Portuguese, and at least in that language "The Double" continues Saramago's tradition of writing in a way that is intentionally maddening, e.g., using impersonal pronouns whose referents are not easily discerned; referring back in the fifth clause of a sentence to something he broached in the first, after introducing distracting themes in between. Whether these teasing effects are as clear in the English translation I don't know, but I hope they are. In other words, at some point you are not only entitled but expected to skip a sentence, paragraph, or page.

As for the substance, "The Double" may be Saramago's most noirish work. It's a thriller that reminds me of the 1951 Alfred Hitchcock classic, "Strangers on a Train." I don't think it gives away too much of the plot to say that here as there, the meeting of two strangers leads to disturbing consequences. Unlike "Strangers on a Train," however, in which Guy is basically good and Bruno is evil, Saramago's two protagonists, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso and António Claro, are either morally ambiguous in the one case or more sinister in the other. The one who is less sinister is rather like the Paul Giamatti character Miles in the movie "Sideways"; of him (and you may wish to skip to the next paragraph, as the following description will reveal who is more evil at the point you reach it in the novel, which is well before the novel makes clear who is the worse) Saramago says, "[He] is not someone who would ordinarily be called a bad type; indeed, we could even find him honorably included on a list of people of good qualities that someone would have resolved to draw up in accordance with criteria that are not too demanding . . . ." This is typical of Saramago's dry wit.

Saramago remains my favorite author, and although some of his novels are more successful than others, he continues to show that he richly deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he received in 1998. For diehard Saramago fans, I can say that I've read "Seeing" in Portuguese, and it's first-rate. You can find my review of it, in English, on Amazon under the novel's Spanish title, "Ensayo Sobre la Lucidez." When the English translation is published, I'll post the review there too. I'm just starting his latest, "As Intermitências da Morte" ("The Intermittences of Death"), and hope to have something to say about it soon. Finally, let me say that Portuguese is not the easiest romance language to learn, but if you decide to give it a try and learn it, you'll be well-rewarded by being able to read Saramago in his own words.