O Homem Duplicado

By José Saramago

Book Overview

The inspiration for the major motion picture Enemy starring Jake Gyllenhaal and directed by Denis Villeneuve Tertuliano M ximo Afonso is a divorced, depressed history teacher. To lift his spirits, a colleague suggests he rent a certain video. Tertuliano watches the film, unimpressed. But during the night, when he is awakened by noises in his apartment, he goes into the living room to find that the VCR is replaying the video. He watches in astonishment as a man who looks exactly like him-or, more specifically, exactly like he did five years before, mustachioed and fuller in the face-appears on the screen. He sleeps badly.

Against his better judgment, Tertuliano decides to pursue his double. As he roots out the man's identity, what begins as a whimsical story becomes a wonderfully twisted meditation on identity and individuality (The Boston Globe). Saramago displays his remarkable talent in this haunting tale of appearance versus reality.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156032589
• ISBN13: 9780156032582
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Through The Looking Glass With Saramago

Saramago's "The Double" is a beautifully worded and somewhat experimental novel that truly earns the title true literature. In a masterful tale, the author immediately brings the reader into the story, by including him in most of the secrets of the book, in advance of the characters. In several places the author speaks directly to the reader, and is ever conscious of how certain items in his rendition, and the plot twists...

"Am I really a mistake, he wondered."

In what may be Jose Saramago's most playful novel, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a secondary school history teacher, views a film and is stunned to discover an actor who looks exactly like him in every respect. "One of us is a mistake," he declares, and as he begins (typically) to overanalyze the fact that "never before in the history of humanity have two identical people existed in the same place and time," he finds himself...

A Magical Tale by a Master Writer

From the day I discovered BLINDNESS, I have been a great fan of Jose Saramago's work: THE STONE RAFT, THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS CHRIST, and THE CAVE to mention a few. I picked up THE DOUBLE with eager anticipation and was not disappointed. The pacing is slow and deliberate, the sentences long and convoluted in typically Saramagian style, but this is a book that I simply did not want to put down. Every time I planned to...

A rule-breaking and thought-provoking novel

Since THE DOUBLE was my first Jose Saramago book, it was eagerly anticipated. I had heard high praise about THE CAVE. The author's name had been mentioned in some surprising circles. So I'm not sure what I expected here. What I got was a book like no other --- in some ways incredible, in other ways bewildering. Just the lead character's name, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, strikes a discordant note from the beginning. And Saramago...