Este tópico está presentemente marcado como "adormecido"—a última mensagem tem mais de 90 dias. Pode acordar o tópico publicando uma resposta.
1arubabookwoman
The Double by Jose Saramago
Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a mild-mannered history teacher, is thunderstruck when he sees an exact duplicate of himself playing a bit part in the video of a B-grade movie he is watching. This "double" becomes his obsession, and Tertuliano, after several arguments with his Common Sense (which Common Sense lost) decides he must confront the double. His methodic, systematic search for the double is described in minute detail by an authorial narrator who from time to time inserts himself into the narrative to provide writing tips ("Those words, Nothing Happened, are used when there is an urgent need to move on to the next incident or when, for example, one does not quite know what to do with the character's own thoughts, especially if they bear no relation to the existential milieu in which the character is supposed to live and work. The teacher and fledging lover of videos, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, is in precisely this situation as he is driving his car. He was in fact thinking, a lot and very intensely, but his thoughts bore so little relevance to the last twenty-four hours he had just lived that if we were to take them into account and include them in this novel, the story we had decided to tell would inevitably have to be replaced by another....This would mean declaring all our hard work, these forty or so dense, difficult pages null and void...."), as well as some heavy-handed forboding ("It will not be long before we discover the tragic consequences of leaving unexcavated a second-world-war bomb in the belief that it was too old to explode." "Too late my friend, too late, you've opened Pandora's box and now you have to live with the consequences....").
This searching part of the book goes on perhaps a tad too long, but the novel really takes off when Tertuliano and his double begin to parry with each other. The novel then moves quickly to an unexpected ending.
Written in what I believe is Saramago's characteristic style--long run-on sentences, little punctuation, paragraphs that are pages long-- the novel is nevertheless easy to read, and very, very enjoyable.
Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a mild-mannered history teacher, is thunderstruck when he sees an exact duplicate of himself playing a bit part in the video of a B-grade movie he is watching. This "double" becomes his obsession, and Tertuliano, after several arguments with his Common Sense (which Common Sense lost) decides he must confront the double. His methodic, systematic search for the double is described in minute detail by an authorial narrator who from time to time inserts himself into the narrative to provide writing tips ("Those words, Nothing Happened, are used when there is an urgent need to move on to the next incident or when, for example, one does not quite know what to do with the character's own thoughts, especially if they bear no relation to the existential milieu in which the character is supposed to live and work. The teacher and fledging lover of videos, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, is in precisely this situation as he is driving his car. He was in fact thinking, a lot and very intensely, but his thoughts bore so little relevance to the last twenty-four hours he had just lived that if we were to take them into account and include them in this novel, the story we had decided to tell would inevitably have to be replaced by another....This would mean declaring all our hard work, these forty or so dense, difficult pages null and void...."), as well as some heavy-handed forboding ("It will not be long before we discover the tragic consequences of leaving unexcavated a second-world-war bomb in the belief that it was too old to explode." "Too late my friend, too late, you've opened Pandora's box and now you have to live with the consequences....").
This searching part of the book goes on perhaps a tad too long, but the novel really takes off when Tertuliano and his double begin to parry with each other. The novel then moves quickly to an unexpected ending.
Written in what I believe is Saramago's characteristic style--long run-on sentences, little punctuation, paragraphs that are pages long-- the novel is nevertheless easy to read, and very, very enjoyable.
2jfetting
I loved this book! It is such a strange concept, and really one of those books that, if the characters didn't all make such completely ridiculous decisions (like, why did he even want to find his double? It is absurd, really) there would be no story at all. This usually drives me nuts, but in this case the novel drew me right in.
