The Double Book

The thought of having a doppelgänger freaks me out, if I had one, I would rather not know. Even somebody bearing a strong resemblance to one's self is weird enough, but an actual replica? with the same moles, the same scars, and the same voice. No thanks. I am me, and I want to keep it that way. If only History professor Tertuliano Máximo Afonso returned the video tape to the shop and forgot all about what he witnessed on screen. But he couldn't, a curiosity built up inside him. Just who is that man who looks like my identical twin? I want to know who he is. I must find him.

Made in our own image, the double can incarnate our evil deeds, or kindly take our place in order to perform a seemingly impossible task, it is one of the most complex and richly told fables. José Saramago is clearly influenced by the old tales. Whether a different version of Christ's Passion, or an account of the universal scourge of being sightless, Saramago has found in these primordial narratives fodder for his own fictional world. One I would say he excels at. The main character, Tertuliano, becomes obsessed with the idea of meeting the person he takes to be his double, a bit part actor called Antonio Claro. After obsessively viewing dozens of other movies by the same production company, he gets results by discovering his name. And ponders on his next move. This would lead to a chain of events that not only desn't go according to plan, but opens up a whole other set of possibilities that spells danger for the people he most cares about, including his girlfriend, Maria da Paz.

I loved Saramago's story, the way it delved deep into my consciousness, resulting in a finale that sat well with me. As for Tertuliano himself, a guy who meandered through life feeling like someone owed him a favour. He believes he is depressed. No. He wants to be depressed. Why? A nice girl who is far too good for him, a decent well payed job. Put the violin away. To me he just appeared to be a bit of a drip. The long continuous sentences and detailed faintly comic descriptions of Tertuliano's comings and goings started to annoy me, and then it didn't. Saramago may be a Nobel laureate who feels obliged to write like a Prose experimentalist filling the pages with hardly any paragraph breaks, but thankfully, from my own perspective this is something that wasn't new, and writing style eventually I came to truly admire. After the point of no return, when the Identicals finally meet, I loved every minute right through to it's conclusion, it just took a while to get into the story.

There's nothing particularly new in positing a logical world and then introducing an absurd element which leads to an unravelling of identity. It's true that he takes the story in some unexpected directions, but that's to be expected, it keeps you on your toes. His history teacher becomes more decisive, more alert to the world around him, more committed to his life in the shadow of his doppelgänger. His depression is a thing of the past. He simply hasn't the mind anymore to wallow in pity knowing he's out there. The actor Antonio Claro starts off as the innocent party only to grow more into a menace the longer the story progresses. I had absolutely no idea what was likely to happen from one moment to the next. Isn't that such a wondrous feeling to possess whilst reading a novel.

One of the other pleasures of the book is the way Saramago faithfully follows the relentless logic of the situation he has devised. When the two men meet, it is at once apparent that they are indeed doubles. Down to the moles on their forearms and the date of their birth. Immediately, existential questions are raised. Which of them, Tertuliano worriedly wonders, is the original and which the duplicate. No answers there. When it turns out that Claro was born a half-hour before Tertuliano, it somehow becomes inevitable that one of them will have to be destroyed. Having been born on the same day, they both want to know, of course, if they are destined also to die on the same day.

Saramago doesn't bother with quotation marks to denote when people are speaking, and he doesn't break up conversations aside from inserting commas in between each person's statements, but that aside I found it great, Saramago on top form. He certainly wasn't a writer shy of confidence within himself, and he maybe one of the masters of the Long Sentence to the annoyance of some, but from a psychological and moral standpoint he simply sucked me in.