→ April 28, 2020
→ By

The Double.

Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago’s novel The Double seldom appears on the list of his most notable works, even though it was adapted into a movie by Dennis Villeneuve (retitled Enemy) starring Jake Gyllenhaal in the two title roles – two, because the story revolves around a man who discovers that there’s another man, an obscure actor who has minor roles in various films, who is a carbon copy of himself. The two men are completely indistinguishable, not identical twins, but identical in every way, down to scars and blemishes, leading the first character into an existential crisis, one where he tracks down his double and causes a spiral of problems for both of them and for the people closest to them.

Tertuliano, whose name roughly translates as “chatty” (or something more pejorative), is the first man, a history teacher whose colleague suggests that he rent a particular movie without explaining up front what the significance of the film might be. It turns out that a minor character actor in the film is a dead ringer for Tertuliano, a similarity that affects the teacher far more than you might expect at first. He tries to find the actor’s name, renting any movie he can find from the same production company, and eventually uses a subterfuge to contact the actor. Even their voices are identical – the actor’s wife thinks it’s her husband on the phone, not Tertuliano, playing a prank on her – and when the two men meet, there’s an immediate, mutual disdain as you might see when two cats meet each other for the first time and each decides that it’s his territory and the other is an intruder. As with cats, this leads to a sort of pissing contest where each man tries to demonstrate some sort of dominance over the other, as if to say that he’s the real person and the other the facsimile, with consequences that are both shocking and foreseeable, with a clever little twist in the novel’s very last paragraph.

Saramago expresses the existential crisis that Tertuliano undergoes rather well throughout the book, keeping the character’s anxiety and dread visible but at a slow boil, so his actions and gestures aren’t overly dramatic or forced. Once you accept the premise that he’s undone by this thought that he has a clone in the world, and loses some sense of himself in the process, everything that follows makes sense. It’s his clone who seems harder to buy, especially when he bullies Tertuliano into accepting something extraordinary, an action that ultimately leads to the novel’s climax and resolution – although the payoff does mostly justify the torturous path that got us there.

The bigger question around The Double is how well Saramago communicates the reasons for the existential crisis – that is, why Tertuliano goes off the rails just because he saw his duplicate in a movie. It might be unnerving to see someone who looks just like you in a film, but would you stalk that person and try to meet up with them? Would you let this unravel your entire life? Probably not, unless your life was already a bit threadbare, but Saramago doesn’t give us any real reason to believe that Tertuliano was already in that kind of state – he’s not a happy man or very fulfilled by work or his relationship with his girlfriend, yet he doesn’t come across as a man on the verge before he sets off on his quixotic effort to find his double.

You’re also not going to get any explanation of how the clones came about, either, so don’t go into The Double expecting one: the resolution is about the characters, not the mystery of their existence. I was hoping for some kind of answer, but Saramago never actually implies that he’s going to provide one, and the book heads in a different direction from the start; it’s hard to see a way where he could have given that explanation and still taken the story where it goes. It doesn’t live up to Blindness, one of his best-known and best-regarded novels, which pulls off the trick of a compelling (if often gross) story that conveys a stronger philosophical message, but is at least thought-provoking with a plot that works right up through its resolution.

Next up: I’m a few write-ups behind but am currently reading Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower.

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→ March 7, 2018
→ By

Blindness.

Sometimes I get hung up on a specific review, and end up going a few days between posts here because that one book or film is clogging the mental road and nothing else can come out until I figure out what I want to say. The most recent title to do this is Nobel Prize for Literature winner Jose Saramago’s book Blindness, a strange, hypnotic, disturbing-on-many-levels parable about an epidemic of “white blindness” that is unexplained and contagious, leading to the total breakdown of civilization in a matter of weeks.

Characters in Blindness don’t even get names, and throughout the book Saramago refers to them as the first blind man, the girl with dark glasses, the old man, and so on. The first man to go blind has it hit him while he’s driving in traffic, and he turns out to be Patient Zero, as the sight loss is highly contagious. The authorities move quickly to quarantine patients, and in their initial sweep they take in the wife of one of the first patients when she claims she’s gone blind as well – but she hasn’t, and lies just to be able to stay with her husband. The patients are thrown in a disused mental asylum (there’s some symbolism right there) and are told they’ll be shot if they try to leave. They’re given food, irregularly, and little else. The people in the asylum try to organize themselves, not realizing one of them can see, but the facilities are quickly overrun, and later waves of patients arrive, including a group that takes over the food supply, extorting first valuables and later women before they’ll release any food to the remainder of the prisoners. The one sighted woman eventually leads a rebellion, after which a few surviving patients leave the asylum to find the city in ruins, haunted by itinerant groups of blind people trying to find food and shelter any way they can. Through unfathomable hardships and privations, their little group – which includes a young boy who arrived at the hospital alone in the first wave, and a “dog of tears” who has followed them since their escape – becomes more than a means of survival, but a familial unit of people who continually sacrifice to help others, and who can thus persevere until the crisis ends.

Saramago was born in Portugal but lived the last portion of his life in exile in the Canary Islands, as his philosophies – he was a militant atheist, communist, anti-fascist, and humanist – ran afoul of the fascist Estado Novo regime in Portugal and later the country’s still-powerful Catholic Church, which objected strongly to his 1991 novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Blindness was published in 1995, after he’d left Portugal, and became his best-known work, one of the novels cited in his Nobel commendation, emblematic of his fabulist style and with his trademark meandering prose that eschews standard sentence structure for something that mimics the nonlinear, stop-and-start path of human thought.

Saramago despised religion and thought that human love and compassion were the solutions to many ills of modern society; Blindness, at its most literal level, takes this to an ungodly extreme. He puts his characters into a post-apocalyptic situation where they’re not dying, but could die from starvation, poor sanitation, or the cruelty of others. Some of the secondary characters are merely truculent or selfish; others are more sanguinary or malevolent. They’re all recognizably human, however, even in their stripped-down state. The one woman who can see – “the doctor’s wife,” in Saramago’s prose – turns out to be, or simply remains, the most compassionate of everyone, even though her sight means she can see the worst that’s happening around her. With her as an anchor, though, her band of vagrants coalesces around each other beyond just the need for survival, with real affection growing among them, and their empathy returning even as they encounter other blind people struggling to stay alive outside the asylum.

The metaphor of blindness lends itself to too many interpretations for me to ever focus on a single one while reading it. The idea of us not ‘seeing’ what’s happening to or around us is the most obvious one that came to me. After finishing, I also latched on to the idea of the blindness contagion as the popular reaction to autocracy, especially fascism, where people choose not to see the suffering of others as long as they are unaffected themselves – the ‘first they came for the Jews, and I said nothing’ idea, written from the perspective of the first group to be rounded up, who then serve as witnesses and victims to atrocities that come afterwards. This interpretation, which I think is consistent with Saramago’s personal beliefs, recasts the story as a parable of the power of caring for others, and how that is what defines us as civilized beings, more than our ephemeral institutions or customs could.

The one truly unbearable part of Blindness isn’t the violence or the deprivations, but Saramago’s excessive and almost puerile attention to bodily excretions. There is so much discussion of shit in this book that just isn’t necessary – yes, I get it, the toilets are going to back up, especially once the municipal water system goes offline due to the plague – but Saramago can’t stop discussing it, and urine, and semen, and menstrual blood, to the point of … what, exactly? Reminding us that we are still biological creatures, and thus subject to the same demands and needs of the flesh that other mammals have? If he were trying to point out how our reliance on the people and technology behind our sanitation systems are the only thing keeping us First Worlders from dying of cholera, then I’d understand his point. Instead, we just get imagery that detracts from any larger points Saramago was trying to make.

Before you ask, no, I haven’t seen the 2008 film version, and don’t plan to, given how poor the reviews were and how graphic the content of the novel could be. At least the images in my own head aren’t as indelible as those I see on a screen.

Next up: Somehow I’m in the midst of three books – Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, Nudge by Richard Thaler (on the Kindle), and The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (audiobook). They are, in order, the reigning National Book Award for Fiction winner, the most popular book by the reigning Nobel Prize for Economics winner, and a Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction winner.

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→ March 25, 2009
→ By

The City and the Mountains.

José Maria de Eça de Queirós is, according to several sources (including Encyclopedia Britannica and novelist Jose Saramago), considered Portugal’s greatest novelist, yet his works are apparently just now becoming available in English. He introduced realism to Portuguese literature and idolized Flaubert and Balzac while earning comparisons to Zola.

His novel The City and the Mountains, published in Portugal a year after his death and recently translated by Margaret Jull Costa, is a fable wrapped in a paean to natural and rural living. The story revolves around the narrator’s lifelong friend, Jacinto, who lives in luxury in Paris surrounded by high society and machines designed to make his life easier, yet who is miserable and dying of ennui until a chance occurrence recalls him to his ancestral home in the fictional countryside town of Tormes, Portugal.

The novel begins in in Paris (the City) and ends in Tormes (the Mountains), moving from a satire of the decadent and spiritually bankrupt Paris of the late 1800s to the pure, honest, yet feudal society of the still-agrarian Portuguese country. Jacinto’s life in Paris is one of misadventure more than adventure, especially as his machines malfunction, leading him to try to acquire bigger and more complex machines to replace them. Eça de Quierós lampoons the opulence and conspicuous consumption of Parisian society with depictions of over-the-top parties and empty-headed aristocrats as Jacinto drifts unwittingly into soul-crushing despair. Even the religion of the wealthy city-dwellers is perfunctory and perhaps faithless, more concerned with status and the religious hierarchy than questions of piety and charity.

Yet a chance event in Tormes beckons him home, a trip for which he tries to pack as many of his earthly possessions, fearing (ironically) boredom in the isolated hillside town where his family estate lies. After the comic misadventures of the multi-day train trip with the narrator, Zé Fernandes, they arrive in Tormes and Jacinto gradually rediscovers himself, according to Zé:

I forthrightly compared him to an etiolated plant that had been shriveling up in the darkness, among rugs and silks, but which, once placed outside in the wind and the sun and watered profusely, grows green again, bursts into flower and does honor to Mother Nature! … In the City, his eyes had grown crepuscular, as if averted from the World; now, though, there danced in them a noon-tide light, resolute and generous, content to drink in the beauty of things. Even his moustache had grown curly.

Yet Tormes isn’t quite the paradise Jacinto first believes it to be, as the income disparity that was hidden from view in Paris is out in the open on his family’s vast estate. Jacinto himself decides to take on the role of social reformer in the face of opposition from the caretakers, standing in as symbols of the old way of life. It is, in many ways, a call to action to readers who have lost their spirits in the great cities of the time: return to the country, to nature, to your faith, and to your humanity. Even if the setting is dated, the disconnect with nature and the emotional desolation of city life is more than ever a part of our society (and I say that as an unabashed fan in many ways of great cities).

Eça de Queirós litters the book with direct and indirect allusions to literary works, particularly Don Quixote (also a tale of two friends on a quest) and Homer’s The Odyssey (also a quest, one where the main character, like Jacinto, returns at the end to the place of his birth). The two main characters read and re-read these works, and Zé does comment on the parallels between their quest and those of the stories they read, but Eça de Queirós imbues his characters’ quest with a more urgent meaning while still bringing much of the comic brilliance of Cervantes, perhaps even more impressively since he doesn’t get to use the obvious dim-bulb jokes on which Cervantes could rely.

I was talking to We’ve Got Heart’s Kristen H. about the book, and she brought up The Alchemist. I found The City and the Mountains to be a better book overall, with a stronger plot and much better prose, while also offering a powerful message, one with both mundane and spiritual elements.

Next up: Our friend Joe Posnanski’s The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America, still just $5.99 hardcover at amazon.com.

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