The Double

This is a wonderful book, one of the best books that I read in a couple of years. I highly recommend it. I read several of Jose Saramago's books in the past and enjoyed them. After reading this one, I ordered three more Saramago books.Jose Saramago (1922-2010), a Portuguese writer, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. In 2008, the noted critic Harold Bloom called him “the greatest novelist alive in the world today.” He wrote his first novel in 1947 “The Land of Sin” when he was 25. He was not noticed as a brilliant writer until he was 60. Some readers see some of his novels as allegories, others see some of them as satires. The Noble Prize Committee described his books as “modern skepticism about official truths.” He was an atheist and communist. He mocked religion in such books as his 1991 “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” which I enjoyed, although the Catholic Church understandably scorned and ridiculed the book.He has a unique writing style. His sentences are unusually long, frequently a page long. He often mixes the novel’s characters’ thoughts with those of the book’s narrator, but clearly differentiating the two. He does not use quotation marks. He places conversations between people in a single sentence and distinguishes each person’s remarks by ending it with a comma and beginning the next person’s statement with a capital letter. One should not think that this style makes the book hard to read, this is not so, it adds to the velocity of the conversation and our understanding that this is a single chat.“The Double” was published in 2002. The San Francisco Chronicle called it the best book of 2004, the year it was translated into English. The New York Times wrote: “It’s tempting to think of [The Double] as his masterpiece.” The novel is great not because of the events in the tale, but because of the way the story is told.It is about a college history teacher who is bored with life, with the repetitions of his same lectures to different classes year after year, with marking papers, with same sex with a girlfriend, and more. He broods often. He happens to see a movie video in which there is a bit player who looks exactly like him. He becomes obsessed thinking about the actor and visits him. He discovers that his double is identical to him in every way: in looks, voice, fingerprints, moles, even scars. Their lives, however, are different. He is a history teacher in a small secondary school, while his double is a bit player in movies. He is unmarried, divorced, has a lovely girlfriend; the double is married. Near the end of the novel, the two decide to switch roles for a night. Each joining the other’s woman for sex, for the women cannot tell the men apart, with a bad result.Of course, it is impossible for two people to be so alike. However, the impossibility prompts us to not only enjoy the story but also seek its interpretation. The Boston Globe stated the tale is a “wonderfully twisted meditation on identity and individuality.” I read the tale as depicting a psychological the failure that most people have, of being dissatisfied with themselves, wanting to be someone else, and have other experiences.A film based on this novel was made, “Enemy,” and I reviewed it. It is totally unlike the novel, but it is still very good.

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be Nothing in this somewhat overblown metaphysical novel. As in the famous Shakespeare quote, it's "full of sound and (oddly hesitant) fury, signifying nothing." Perhaps I'm just expressing my pique at reading carefully, sorting the voices, carrying all the possible interpretations in my short-term memory with readerly conscientiousness, and then finishing the book with the sense that it's just a clever mirror trick or shell game."The Double" tells of a self-absorbed history teacher who discovers a bit-part actor accidentally in a rented film, who seems to be his physical 'double.' Becoming immediately obsessed with the existential dilemma of being himself merely a 'double' of someone else, he plunges into a bizarre search for his other self. It all leads to absurdity and trouble. Part detective game, part modern romance of futility, the novel is craftily constructed and wittily written. I'm sure I've awarded five-star reviews to books not half as well made, but which didn't leave me feeling cheated.It's a stream-of-consciousness construct, this coy novel, but whose consciousness is streaming? Tertuliano, the history teacher, is the owner of the mind we readers invade, but his thoughts are delivered as "third person." It's the author whose voice we hear in "first person," who plainly tells us that he's making the whole story up as he goes, improvising, apostrophizing, lecturing himself in parentheses. Is the author himself the double of his slightly pedantic and parenthetical character? Is the author Saramago or Saramago's projected double? Honestly, friends, I find this kind of stuff interesting. I don't hold a bit of self-referential, self-conscious modernism against a writer. I've taken great pleasure in reading novels far more complex, chaotic even, than this one. But I don't like to feel flamboozled. In the end, "The Double" is not so much a complex novel as a novel that pretends to be complex.

I had to read this for a lit class. A few things you have to understand about Saramago: Punctuation does not exist. If you're okay with that, dive right in. Just be aware, his sentences span pages, his paragraphs are entire chapters, and dialog is delimited by commas instead of quotations and line breaks. Some people don't mind this. I certainly do.As far as plot goes, it was an interesting premise. The concept of the doppelganger is common in folklore, and Saramago does an excellent job exploring why we fear doubles so much, how it forces us to question our identity, and how people cope with losing their identity. However, such as the case with any work of literature it seems, the build up is slow. Saramago digs deep into the mind and mediocrity of the life of a plebeian for the first 80% of the story. The pace doesn't pick up until the last 20% of the story, in which everything happens at once. This dispersal makes a novel that is so short extremely dense.We were informed we had to read this story in three days. Normally, about 350 pages is no problem for me, especially with the size of the type in my copy, but reading this story in three days was a chore. I could honestly read any of the LotR books with all of Tolkien's flowery language, anything by Brandon Sanderson, or a variety of other authors in less time than it took me to read this book, if that gives you any idea of how dense it is.TL;DR: If short, dense books examining the complexity of the human psyche under stress with convoluted sentence structure are your thing, then this is the book for you. If not, run. Run the other direction. As fast as humanly possible. Faster than humanly possible. There are many other books you would take greater pleasure in reading than this one.

While watching a rented video, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is shocked to notice that one of the extras in the film is identical to him in every physical detail. Unable to forget this actor he embarks on a secret quest to find his double which takes both Afonso and his doppelganger down some dark paths, leading each one to question `who is real and who is the copy'.After reading Blindness I was fully prepared for Saramago's style of writing which is dense, large parts are written as a stream of consciousness and there are few paragraphs breaks and no quotation marks. The result is conversational and witty although I did find that because The Double is not nearly as plot driven as Blindness it did drag in some parts.The appeal of Saramago for me are his ideas and the concepts he attempts to convey. The double is a great concept and the mystery and the more philosophical aspects of the novel as well as the writing kept me engaged until the end. This may not be the easiest read but there are twists right up to the end and it played on my mind for weeks afterwards.

I was eager to read this book after watching the film Enemy and realising it was based on a Saramago book; I loved his other book Blindness. I didn't struggle with Saramago's bizarre writing style in Blindness, but here I found it jarring. Paragraphs went on for over half a page, and it felt very slow-paced and tedious. It felt like Saramago was going 'round the houses' instead of getting straight to the point and progressing with the storyline. I'm glad I've read it as the story is great, but it takes a lot of work to wade through the seeming superfluous text.

I had to write a review to balance some of the reviews claiming it's dull, too long, or the style isn't right. Yes, the sentences are long, yes the dialogue isn't broken out, but come on, does every book have to be the same? It rattles along; I loved the narrator commenting on the act of narration as well as doing the job: it's interesting and funny. I loved it. Took no time to read at all.

[The Double by José Saramago.]There are just a small handful of characters in this book and the most prominent, though the story is not about this character, is that of the capricious narrator - or maybe narrators, because they refer to themselves as "we" maybe meaning the muses, maybe meaning the so-called Victoria "we". Let us. For the sake of ease, assume that the narrator is guilty of nosism - for it is obvious they are not talking about the narrator and the reader when saying "we".The narrator not only tells the story, but blends in philosophy, sociology, semantics, and a variety of subjects to create a running commentary which occasionally extends beyond that expected of any impartial observer recounting events. Indeed the narrator has a limitless imagination; often wandering off on whim to imagine what might happen if someone said this or took that action.Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is a history teacher, living a predictable and dull existence, probably suffering from mild depression and the onset of some kind of unspecified anxiety disorder. He watches a video of a film and later realizes that one of the bit-actors looks exactly like him, the double to the title. This triggers an inner turmoil and behavioural shift which causes him to take a course of action with unintended consequences for all.The tone of the novel seems at first light and airy, but this is a thin façade which is soon penetrated. The characters are complex and like real people difficult to analyse or sometimes understand why they take the actions they do.There is humour there, but it is black, ironic or sarcastic - never laugh out loud - nevertheless you will find a wry smile often playing on your lips as you read.Lastly if you have read No Country for Old Men the style of syntax and grammar will be familiar to you. The author, José Saramago, powerfully reminds us with his style of writing and syntax that language has no laws - no one will carry you off to prison, or prosecute you for how you write of interpret the rules of the written word. Language is a nothing more than a tacit agreement and we must concentrate more on content than commas, full stops and other punctuation.The Double is a game changing book which may well re-define what you will expect of novelists in the future.José Saramago.

I loved the story up until right at the end. I’m still unsure what happened and I feel the way the author wrote made it even harder to understand. Maybe it is through fault of my own but I really found this a tough read, it took me a long time to finish because of the way it was written. However something about the story gripped me which made me read it all the way through. The last chapter though just confused me 😭😂