{"id":8407,"date":"2020-04-28T13:33:03","date_gmt":"2020-04-28T17:33:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8407"},"modified":"2020-04-28T13:33:05","modified_gmt":"2020-04-28T17:33:05","slug":"the-double","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/04\/28\/the-double\/","title":{"rendered":"The Double."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Nobel Prize-winning author Jos\u00e9 Saramago’s novel The Double<\/span><\/em><\/a> seldom appears on the list of his most notable works, even though it was adapted into a movie by Dennis Villeneuve (retitled Enemy<\/em>) 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

Saramago expresses the existential crisis that Tertuliano\nundergoes rather well throughout the book, keeping the character’s anxiety and\ndread visible but at a slow boil, so his actions and gestures aren’t overly\ndramatic or forced. Once you accept the premise that he’s undone by this\nthought that he has a clone in the world, and loses some sense of himself in\nthe process, everything that follows makes sense. It’s his clone who seems\nharder to buy, especially when he bullies Tertuliano into accepting something\nextraordinary, an action that ultimately leads to the novel’s climax and\nresolution – although the payoff does mostly justify the torturous path that\ngot us there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

You’re also not going to get any explanation of how the clones came about, either, so don’t go into The Double <\/em>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<\/a><\/em>, 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: I’m a few write-ups behind but am currently reading Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nobel Prize-winning author Jos\u00e9 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[224,362,250,808],"class_list":["post-8407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-nobel-prize","tag-portuguese-literature","tag-psychological-novels","tag-speculative-fiction","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8407"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8410,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8407\/revisions\/8410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}