The Double
by Jose Saramago
Vintage, $116
How well do you really know yourself? In fact, are you you, or are you really someone else who looks like you? In The Double, Jose Saramago returns to the subject of the doppelganger. One shows up on the television screen of Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a depressed teacher who rents a video of a comedy film. Afonso is shocked to see the mirror image of himself in his living room. So begins his quest to discover the identity and whereabouts of his alter ego. Here, Saramago probes the destructive anxieties that underpin the doppelganger myth, sending Afonso down a twisted trail of compulsion that climaxes in an explosive malevolence when he meets his double: they must do battle, and one must prove the nemesis of the other. In winning the Nobel Prize in 1998 Saramago may have bewildered the judges with his dense, stream-of-consciousness style of writing and tendency to digress while philosophising. The Double conceals dark secrets, but patience is required to discover them. The Independent described it as 'philosophy and thriller [set in] an unearthly world of counterpoint and counterfeit'.
