From a single premise, he can generate prodigies of grounded fantasy. Saramago has a distinctive imagination, characterised not by leaps or flights but by a sublime grinding, as anyone who has read his implacable fable, Blindness, can confirm. You don't get to be a Nobel laureate simply by strewing obstacles in the path of your readers. Overall, the physical experience of reading The Double is of living in a house without windows. Even when the conversations are simple, they take some disentangling: 'Forgive is just a word, Words are all we have, Where are you going now, Somewhere or other, to pick up the pieces and try and hide the scars.' The accelerated pace of speech within the prose format make the eye stumble. The reader hungers for the piquancy of a single inverted comma. (Oct.Any visual relief that might be provided by dialogue is denied by the device of embedding it in the prose, with only a capital letter to denote shift of speaker.

This semi-allegory is certainly not one of Saramago's more noteworthy offerings. Afonso has several hokey 'dialogues' with 'common sense' his situation, which might be the germ for an excellent short story, is stretched out far beyond the length it deserves.

Narrating in his usual long, rambling sentences, Saramago suspends his characters and their actions in fussy authorial asides. Soon the two are in a competition that involves sex and power. The actor, a rather sleazy fellow, resents Afonso's presence, as if his identical appearance were a sort of ontological theft. Finally tracking the man down, he suggests a meeting. Soon Afonso is feverishly renting videos, trying to find the actor's name, while hiding his project from his suspicious colleague, his lover and his mother. The video itself is a forgettable comedy, but the actor who plays the minor role of hotel clerk (so minor he isn't listed in the credits) is Afonso's physical double. On the suggestion of a colleague, one night Máximo watches a video that changes everything. Middle-aged, divorced and in a relationship with a woman, Maria da Paz, he is bored with life. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is a history teacher in an unnamed metropolis (presumably Lisbon). The double motif, which has fascinated authors as diverse as Poe, Dostoyevski and Nabokov, is revived in this surprisingly listless novel by Portuguese master Saramago.

The double jose saramago