“…unlike Dostoyevsky’s The Double and Poe’s ‘William Wilson,’ Saramago’s Double does not wrap the perception of a double in the protagonist’s delusional pathology or a suggestion of an inner self projected outward. The wildly ramifying plot has an improvised air but proves to be tightly knit, constructed toward a stark dénouement. Their interactions and confusions, as intricate as those of a French bedroom farce, are scrupulously placed within the confines of working days and seasonal vacations, just as the waking nightmare, for Tertuliano and António, of confronting an exact physical duplicate is set in a sufficiently persuasive (though unnamed) metropolis of five million people, with their automobiles, their apartments, their anonymity.
Jose Saramago's original conceit of a pair of coincidentally identical beings brought into repulsive-attractive contact, it must have occurred to him, was fraught with.His new novel, The Double, deals with white-collar workers: the thirty-eight-year-old hero, the impressively named Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, teaches history in a secondary school the divorced Tertuliano’s present lady friend, Maria da Paz, works in a bank Tertuliano’s double, António Claro, acts in minor movie roles under the name of Daniel Santa-Clara his wife, Helena, works in a travel agency. Physical characteristics, measurements, dates, are all a match, indicating that in virtually all apparent matters Tertuliano Maximo Afonso and Antonio Claro (professionally "Daniel Santa-Clara") are duplicates of each other. He learns that he has been duplicated (or is himself, as he thinks later, the duplicate) in the person of a movie actor of bit parts just now on the verge of making it big. The life of a high-school history teacher changes abruptly when he makes an astounding discovery.
PUBLISHED IN 2002 as O Homem Duplicado (literally, "the duplicated man"), The Double aspires to be a thriller of the kind one imagines Gabriel Marcel, who observed that existentialism turned life into a thriller, would have recognized if not relished.
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