A story of a school history teacher, whose archaic name, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, is a constant prick and an incessant irritant to him, only dealt with timid avoidance and shameful efforts at courage. This passage paints him well ;"Tertuliano Máximo Afonso does not belong to that extraordinary group of people who can smile even when alone, his nature inclines him more to melancholy, to reverie, to an exaggerated awareness of the transience of life, to an incurable perplexity when faced by the genuine Cretan labyrinths of human relationships." It’s one of those books which you can love and hate at the same time. The theme is essentially bleak and unlike Dostoevskian ‘Double’ or Kafka’s ‘The Trial’, the canvas, rather than foraying purely into the dark entrails and black alleys, confines itself to incidents and events making use of vivid imagery and contemporary symbols albeit the core remains entrenched with existential questions harping on issues of one’s identity, it’s meaning, composition and scope.“he, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, killed her, his moral weakness killed her, the will that made him blind to everything but revenge killed her, it was said that one of them, either the actor or the history teacher, was superfluous in this world, but you weren't, you weren't superluous, there is no duplicate of you to come and replace you at your mother's side, you were unique, just as every ordinary person is unique, truly unique.”“and in which it will be necessary to find some point of equilibrium between having been and continuing to be, it is doubtless comforting to have our consciousness tell us, I know who you are, but our own consciousness might start to doubt both us and its own words if it were to notice, all around, people asking each other the awkward question, Who's he.”To overcome his ‘depression’ a colleague suggests Tertuliano Maximo Afonso a movie and he accidentally chances upon the existence of his ‘double’, Antonio Claro, an actor in the movie, a head to toe exact duplicate who is neither a twin or related to him. His life is never the same from then on and he takes upon himself the task of solving this mystery quite literally to its bitter end. From being a tale of awe and surprise, assumptions and stupefactions, it turns into a tale of deceit and vengeance that nearing the end, has all the makings of a compelling thriller. It ends in tragedy with the death of Antonio Claro (who happens to carry the identity of Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, at the time of death) and Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s fiancée Maria da Paz. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso now mistaken dead is forced to assume Antonio Claro’s identity and live with Helena, Antonio Claro’s wife. What begins as an innocuous and natural predicament of Tertuliano Máximo Afonso ends in a sequence that bewilders and may even disgust. One can’t help thinking that the author has taken far too many liberties; it’s difficult to understand his intentions to a point that it appears obnoxiously absurd and downright trivial. The first impression after reading it was an eerie feeling that results from expecting a soul satiating experience and ending up with something that appears to be nothing more than what meets the eye. ‘Common sense’ is actually a character in the book that appears time to time to warn, to literally talk some sense into Tertuliano’s head who invariably ignores. He comes across as a stubborn, rigid and a possessed character who is best left alone in the matters concerning him, albeit to his own peril;"..the role of common sense in the history of your species has never gone beyond advising caution and chicken soup, especially in those cases where stupidity has already taken the floor and looks set to take the reins too,..""..Why not, Because it's not healthy for the mind to live cheek by jowl with common sense, eating at the same table, sleeping in the same bed, taking it along to work, and asking its approval or permission before making a move, you've got to take a few risks of your own, Who do you mean, All of you, the human race,.."Almost all his relationships are cold and distant and that includes his own mother. Once when blanketed by the mist of reverie and sub consciousness, he imagines;",but the fact that boulder carried on back of the Amorite should have reminded him that he hadn't phoned his mother for nearly a week, even the most skilled interpreter of dreams would have been incapable of explaining to us, having excluded outright as insulting and ill intentioned, the easy interpretation that, deep down, and never daring to confess as much to himself, he thinks of his progenitor as a heavy burden."Reflection into the work (complemented by the friend who suggested reading it), presented a possibility of a novel perspective into the nature of story. Like one of those ‘Christopher Nolan’ narratives, where the end is the beginning of confusing/intriguing questions, the answers lying in the deepest layers of mystery and surreal in the realm of individuals own understanding far removed from the author. “Gradually, like a cloud of steam flowing back to its place of origin, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's terrified spirit returned to his exhausted mind, and when Helena asked, So what was this bad dream about, tell me, this confused man, this builder of labyrinths in which he himself is lost, who is lying now beside a woman who, although known to him in the sexual sense, is otherwise entirely unknown, spoke of a road that had ceased to have a beginning, as if his own steps as they were taken had devoured the very substances, whatever they might be, that give or lend duration to time and dimension to space,”What if, Saramago meant it all as a nightmare of Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, a schizophrenic, hallucinatory individual whose life is a conglomeration of indistinguishable layers of reality and fiction? The evidence to this is by no means conclusive but puts across just one of the many ways of interpretation. It appears that only when viewed laterally does this work shine up in all its brilliantly lit up details, else it falls too flat and is hard to believe. I ended up giving ‘one extra star’ only after realizing its amenability to a multitude of individualistic interpretations which is not obvious though. I understand there would be readers who will utterly disagree with any lateral quality of this book which appealed to me only after a long incubation period of deliberation. The work in fact is replete with Saramago signatures, his digressive and unconventional narrative style that leaves you literally out of breath at times because of the never ending sentences where two speakers are distinguished only by commas. At times the dialogues get all jumbled up and quite a few times one has to move backwards in the text flow in order to find the end that got lost in the maze of words and commas. If you are new to him, working your way through can be tedium indeed. But this very skein provides an apt background to the tone of his texts. You might even end up falling in love with this hallmark of his writing repertoire and rare acumen of weaving intricate tapestries out of characters who do not lead extraordinary lives and always seem within reach, yet their predicaments and travails are downright existential. It is easy to relate to them."The human soul is a box out of which a clown is always ready to spring, making faces and sticking out his tongue, but there are times when that same clown merely peers at us over the edge of the box, and if he sees that, by chance, we are behaving in a just and honest fashion, he merely nods approvingly and disappears, thinking that we are not yet an entirely lost cause."This is an intriguing and unavoidable book which can best be read with an open mind and without great expectations. I ended up liking it although the appreciation was not immediate. The writing is downright brilliant and a compelling reason to reach for this one.
I did not really enjoy Saramago's The Double. To begin with, it's a sloppy handling of a theme which has been done over-and-over, and better done at that: Dickin's The Tale of Two Cities, Poe's "William Wilson," Nabokov's Despair and Dostoyevsky's The Double were all better handlings of the doppelgänger theme than this, I felt. This felt kind of like a more sinister "The Parent Trap" or dropped episode of The Twilight Zone (dropped for being too long maybe). It wasn't bad, I won't say that. Everything was there: identity, doubles, blunt bludgeoning of routine, life and death, ideals and jealousies, etc. But at the end of the book I just felt that it was marginal: vain attempts at humor, tedious longeurs, unidimensional supporting characters. This might have made a fun, quirky novella, but as a full novel it hits a flat note.The issue of identity is brought into the twenty-first century, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso feels depressed and useless, and so decides to watch some movies to cure his ennui. He has a girlfriend, Maria da Paz, who he kind of likes, and a job which he kind of cares about. While watching the movies he notices that one of the extras in the movie is his exact double! His life suddenly takes on meaning to solve the mystery of his exact look-alike, he finds his name and ultimately confronts him. They briefly switch lives, and tell each other a bit about themselves. They have the same birthday, but the double (claims he) was born before Tertuliano, which Tertuliano takes to mean that he is the copy, the supernumerary. It was said that one of them, either the actor or the history teacher, was superfluous in this world, but you weren't, you weren't superfluous, there is no duplicate of you to come and replace you at your mother's side, you were unique, just as every ordinary person is unique, truly unique.Until the confrontation, the book feels a but lifeless: only Tertuliano has any interest for the reader, even Maria seems to be only a silhouette populating the stage of shadows which is The Double. But the climax cannot hold, it falls away fast after their initial inspection to confirm their identicalness (same height: check, same build: check, same dick: check, etc.). The Double read like a story which came to Saramago as a scene (Faulkner notoriously envisioned all his books as one scene, and the book grew around that scene/image), the scene of confrontation, but the rest, the sprawl, feels sloppily done. The prose is well done in many sections, though awkward in others, but the story feels like a dwarf trying to fill a giant's suit: there is too much excess, not enough substance. The characters are too small for the world they populate, and the story is too narrow for the binding.
What do You think about The Double (2004)?
It's possible something got lost in translation, but this book struck me as one of those texts that critics go ga-ga over because it's a slightly humorous diatribe that reassures their ideals (Words define the way we think about, you know, everything! Characters in stories aren't actually real; they're just characters in a narrative, like us!). What could have been a solid 200-some page story about a depressed history teacher's obsession with his anonymous double, found playing a bit part in a forgettable b-movie, is sidetracked by bland humor, cliched language, and repeated attempts to pass off those trite postmodern truisms as if they were still something profound. The excessive moments of humorous pondering ended up distracting me from those rare moments in which crips language, astute observation, and page-turning narrative came together.
—James
I picked this up in Peru while on holidays. Something to read while I lazed on a secluded beach in the north. Really the perfect environment to read... but this book was a real struggle.The first two thirds of the book was just so slow and unmemorable, I kept having to read passages over and over again and i'm still not sure whether it's his writing style or it was because I was so bored that it wouldn't sink in. It really didn't get good until the final third when the pace picked up.The ideas in the book are interesting - what would you do if you met your double and the idea of genetic duplication - but I just can't give the book any more than a 2 stars simply because the first 70% was so unmemorable. If it wasn't for the fact I had so much time to read it on my trip I probably would never have finished it (and it would have got a 0).I do agree the last 100 pages are good but I don't think they are brilliant. This is my first time reading Saramago which I think may have brought a different perspective than those of other reviewers.I ended up leaving the book in Peru.
—Daniel
José Saramago’s The Double is a good short story. Problem is, it’s encased in a meandering novel. The novel focuses on Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a depressed school teacher who rents a movie and discovers that one of the minor actors looks exactly like him from five years ago—a double—except with a mustache. While most people would go, “Neat, that looks like me with a mustache,” Afonso becomes greatly disturbed. Though the narrator—a voice that has a lot of character itself—defends his actions by noting his lack of stability, Afonso quickly becomes an unbelievable character. Sure, it’s a fantastical premise, an interesting one even, but Saramago bogs the story down with nonsensical actions and poor pacing. Afonso believes he must track down his doppelganger to answer that classic question of who is the original and who is the copy, but the first hundred pages are spent with him trying to get the actor’s name by renting all of the movies from the production company and sussing his name out from the crossover in the credits. I realize Afonso is unstable, but ten minutes on Google or IMDB would have sufficed to save many pages. I understand that the Internet would ruin the fun here, but that’s the problem, it’s not entertaining. Readers familiar with Saramago will start to wonder if the payoff at the ending will be worth it this time. The Portuguese author has always had a flair cultivating allegories by use of the fantastical in the standard world, showing the ugliness of humans under pressure, crafting long (sometimes pages long) sentences that deviate from standard grammar (though still work effectively once you’re used to his style), but The Double misses the mark. The ending is good, but the journey to get there costs too much. The clone territory has already been better covered by the literary greats and Saramago has written far better books himself. Read Blindness instead. Two stars.
—Colin McKay Miller
