The Double
By José Saramago
Translated by Margaret Costa
Harcourt, 324 pages, $35
The first imaginative leap a Canadian might make when reading José Saramago's latest novel, The Double, isn't for the Nobel laureate's invention of a duplicated man, it's for his dreamy vision of a local movie business. Saramago's nameless metropolis of five million isn't in our country. His city has a thriving entertainment industry second only to Los Angeles or Bombay, and includes among its citizens the most co-operative video-store clerk ever to live.
Why shouldn't a clerk be excited? This is a city where a man intent on renting 36 movies for the weekend, all of them locally made, can be sure his video store has every title available. A simple case of identical men, a booming film scene, eager clerks — this is utopia compared to the cities in Saramago's previous work. He's already sent one adrift in the ocean for The Stone Raft, and turned another's whole population blind in Blindness. Yes, it's a good place to live for clerks, and for us it is still Saramago's world, with a few needed laughs.
The wonders of film culture are wasted on Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, a high school history teacher for whom movies are about "chasing sky rockets." As Saramago writes on page one, "Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is greatly in need of stimuli to distract him, he lives alone and gets bored." He's become the kind of man prone to split his personality in two, then kill off the worse half — middle-aged, in short. He's depressed over his divorce, his job or both, but it's causing him to act insensitively toward Maria da Paz, the woman he's barely dating.
Pick whichever reason for Tertuliano's despondency, there is a way to "rouse once and for all the part inside him that is trying, all the time, surreptitiously, to slide into sleep." The overly concerned math teacher in his school recommends he rent a dumb comedy, and against Tertuliano's common sense, he takes the advice, if only because, even in such a prosperous city, "discoveries made over the weekend are no less valid."
Tertuliano's first plan after the shock of seeing his double on the screen isn't to go Google the movie, find the bit actor's name in The Race is to the Swift, and track him down. Instead Tertuliano rents, yes, 36 more movies by the same production company, including such local classics as Passenger without a Ticket, The Alarm Rang Twice, and Phone Me Another Day.
The first half of the book has Tertuliano choosing only the most absurd and irrational schemes (including bogus fan mail and clumsy stakeout missions) to clandestinely uncover the identity of his double, the actor Daniel Santa-Clara, listed in the phone book under his real name, António Claro. He lives across town with his wife, Helen, and has achieved modest but optimistic success as an actor. In contrast to Tertuliano's negligible promotion at work, Claro has 55 lines in his next movie. His star is on the ascent when he receives the call from Tertuliano notifying him that he isn't unique.
Among the reasons the math teacher gave Tertuliano for why he should distract himself was: "Don't be deceived, common sense is much too common to really be sense." The moment Tertuliano and Claro meet, each seeing his exact double standing before him, a lifetime of common sense meets its worst critics.
I mention common sense. There are literary mirrors in The Double that serve the theme, and the symmetry among the characters and their circumstances is the most obvious. But common sense becomes an actual personality in the book, as well, so that within Tertuliano's own mind there is even another double. Claro's inevitable choice to take revenge on Tertuliano for destroying his reality (as Claro had inadvertently destroyed Tertuliano's) is mirrored by Tertuliano's mind avenging its own habits.
The Double is Saramago's most suspenseful story since Blindness, and is, strangely, his most optimistic as well, for it's written so that every treacherous step Tertuliano takes to learn about his other self is one step away from a common sense of apathy. The double in literature usually acts as the embodiment of a character's suppressed emotions. In Saramago's novel, Tertuliano must confront the side of him he lost after his divorce. "The eloquent silence, long favoured by a particularly lazy kind of literature, does not exist, eloquent silences are just words that have got stuck in the throat, choked words that have been unable to escape the embrace of the glottis."
Saramago is known for his long, revelatory sentences, his ability to include a multitude of voices in a flow of dialogue and narrative that is unlike any other author's. In The Double, his style is in dramatic harmony with the story, where individual voices from the world are sometimes indistinguishable from the voices of the mind at work.
Lee Henderson is the author of The Broken Record Technique, a collection of stories.
