A double twist on life’s ironies

The Double

A Novel

Jose Saramago

Translated from Portuguese

by Margaret Jull Costa

Harcourt: 326 pp., $25

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The double -- no, not someone who stands in for the film star but a duplicate, a second self, a shadowy twin -- was a specter that haunted many 19th century writers. Shelley reportedly met himself while walking on the beach shortly before his death; Dostoevsky wrote a story titled “The Double,” and Robert Louis Stevenson created a classic portrait of a split personality in “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” But in the new novel from the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, the “double” in question is closer to a clone. He is an ordinary person with a life of his own who, for no discernible reason, happens to be a physical replica of a 38-year-old high school history teacher named Tertuliano Maximo Afonso.

Like the registry office clerk in “All the Names,” Tertuliano is one of Saramago’s solitaries. Although he does have a girlfriend, he doesn’t always return her phone calls lest she come to expect more of him than he’s prepared to give.

“To get a clear idea of his situation, suffice it to say that he was married but can no longer remember what led him into matrimony, that he is divorced and cannot now bring himself to ponder the reasons for the separation. On the other hand, while the ill-fated union produced no children who are now demanding to be handed, gratis, the world on a silver platter, he has, for some time, viewed sweet History, the serious, educational subject which he had felt called upon to teach and which could have been a soothing refuge for him, as a chore without meaning and a beginning without an end.”

Lonely, bored, depressed, in need of “outside stimuli,” Tertuliano follows the suggestion of a colleague and rents a video. The movie, alas, offers little in the way of diversion. But in the wee hours of the night, he is awakened by strange noises: “Like most ordinary people, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is a mixture of cowardice and courage, he isn’t one of those invincible cinema heroes, but neither is he a wimp.... True, he felt all the hairs on his body prickle, but that even happens to wolves when faced by danger, and no one in their right mind would describe wolves as pathetic cowards.” Hastening to his living room, he finds the VCR is playing the movie again.

This time, something in it captures his attention: The man playing the minor role of a hotel clerk looks exactly like him. Astonished and deeply shaken, he sets out on an obsessive quest to track down the actor in question. For some reason, he is tormented by the idea that if this duplicate should exist, one of them must be a mistake.

Saramago’s fiction operates in a realm not far from fable: the territory of Kafka, Gogol and Borges. Irony is the keynote of his enterprise, not only shaping the story but also coloring the very tone of its telling.

In his amiable, gently humorous narrative voice and his fondness for seriocomic digression, Saramago recalls Laurence Sterne (whose “Tristram Shandy” he quotes in his epigraph), not to mention that great progenitor of all novelists, Cervantes.

With a similar kind of playful, exquisitely literary self-consciousness, Saramago embellishes his novel with delightful conversations between the hero and his common sense. The asides and digressions are, in many ways, the point of the story: lighthearted yet thought-provoking disquisitions on history, fate, free will, the origin of words and the inadequacies of language.

While the men in this book -- Tertuliano and actor Antonio Claro, his double -- often behave selfishly and irrationally, the women in their lives -- Claro’s wife, Helena, Tertuliano’s patient and loyal girlfriend, Maria, and his estimable mother, Carolina -- are paragons of compassion, generosity and good old common sense.

Poor Maria, a middle-level bank employee, is somewhat in awe of Tertuliano’s (relative) erudition, as is his mother. But both women are shown to be not only more intelligent than he is but also wiser. The men, alas, seem unable -- or unwilling -- to break free of fatalistic attitudes and the rash acts they engender.

“The Double” begins by intriguing us, proceeds to entertain, charm and engage, and ultimately manages to disturb.

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Merle Rubin is a contributing writer to Book Review.