|
|
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Am I really a mistake, he wondered.", 9 Dec 2004
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
|
by Jose Saramago
by Jose Saramago
by Jose Saramago
by Jose Saramago
by Jose Saramago
