All in the Asides

...He frequently invokes the creator's prerogative to tease the reader by reminding us that he knows "everything that is going to happen up until the very last page of this story...

...Instead he fills the lulls in the life of his hapless hero, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, with intimate, droll authorial digressions...

...One of the most astute asides comes early on, during a faculty meeting at the high school where Tertuliano teaches history...

...His calm dissolves when he checks the fine print on the video case and finds that the film is five years old...

...Their superficial alikeness repels them, and each begins to plot against the other, as if chance resemblance were an effrontery demanding retribution...

...Yet, in this effort to wreak humiliation on the other, they conspire as well, and in so doing Tertuliano betrays his Maria...

...But she also, unwittingly, offers good advice—her own version of a theory of subgestures: "Life, my dear Maximo, has taught me that nothing is simple, it just seems simple sometimes, and it's always when it looks simplest that we should most doubt it...

...He plays back the actor's short appearance over and over, and is relieved to see that the man actually echoes his appearance five years ago, when Tertuliano was thinner in the face and sported a mustache...

...Tertulliano is certainly ready for a struggle...

...He is not privy to Saramago's commentaries, but he is visited occasionally by an inner voice named Common Sense, a disembodied and despised adviser with a habit of materializing beside him suddenly in his car or apartment...

...AT every step of this process, Tertuliano ignores various voices that, like a Greek chorus, warn him to abandon the quest to confront his double...

...She despairs that "All the dictionaries put together don't contain half the terms we would need in order for us to understand each other...

...Common Sense's warnings are far more blunt than Saramago's digressions, so Tertuliano invariably banishes him from his presence...

...In his new novel José Saramago dispenses with such leaps...

...Or at least he could contend against the inevitable with more determination...

...In the process he gently teaches us how to read not only the novel's but the world's fine print...

...After it is too late to stop what he has allowed to be set in motion, Tertuliano attains a brief, tormented moment of clarity: "It seemed to him that he had reached the end of the road, that ahead of him, blocking the way, was a wall with a sign on it saying, stop, abyss, and then he saw that he could not go back, that the road he had traveled had disappeared, and all that remained was the little space on which his feet were standing...

...At first he appears a sleepwalker in his own life, living alone in the wake of a six-year-old divorce...

...A dogged persistence and unsuspected detective abilities that accompany his state enable him to finally discover the actor's real name, Antonio Claro...

...Reviewed by Philip Graham Author, "Interior Design," "How to Read an Unwritten Language" When the action flags—when a character is, say, simply driving home from work, or hesitating before returning a phone call—novelists typically perform the literary equivalent of a filmmaker's jump cut, easing the reader from scene to scene...

...On the advice of a colleague who observes that recently he has looked "rather down," he rents a video for some mild diversion from his depression...

...A healthy attention to subgestures might relieve him of his obsession with his recently discovered physical double, and his fate might be different...

...The Double is yet another haunting book—both a deft reworking of a timeless theme and a virtuoso exercise in voice—from a writer who seems to produce masterpiece after masterpiece like clockwork...

...For when the inevitable encounter with Antonio Claro at last occurs, their uncanny exterior physical similarity—the two discover they even share the same moles and scars— blinds them both to the reality that they are different people under the skin...

...Although Tertuliano is too preoccupied with his secrecy to hear this, it might have proved helpful...

...Yet as Saramago observes dryly in another aside, "The eloquent silence, long favored by a particularly lazy kind of literature, does not exist, eloquent silences are just words that have got stuck in the throat, choked words that have been unable to escape to embrace of the glottis...

...He believes himself to be "a chrysalis in a state of profound withdrawal and undergoing a secret process of transformation...

...The pair ignore the innumerable emotional "subgestures" that might alert them to their more significant differences, their individual expressions of what Saramago calls, in another aside, "the paradoxical energy of the human soul...

...As one of the protagonist's colleagues declaims on modern pedagogical methods, Saramago, who makes it clear the subject does not appeal to him, takes advantage of this downtime to offer the reader a lecture of his own on what he calls subgestures: "People say, for example, that Tom, Dick or Harry, in a particular situation, made this, that or the other gesture, that's what they say, quite simply, as if this, that or the other, a gesture expressing doubt, solidarity or warning, were all of a piece, doubt always prudent, support always unconditional, warning always disinterested, when the whole truth, if we're really interested, if we're not to content ourselves with only the banner headlines of communication, demands that we pay attention to the multiple scintillations of the subgestures that follow behind a gesture like the cosmic dust in the trail of a comet, because, to use a comparison that can be grasped by all ages and intelligences, these subgestures are like the small print in a contract, difficult to decipher, but nonetheless there...

...Watching the video at home, he spots an actor in a bit part who bears an uncanny resemblance to himself...

...Tertuliano might content himself with the observation that "Daniel Santa-Clara does not, strictly speaking, exist, he's a shadow, a puppet, a shifting shape that moves and talks inside a videocassette and returns to silence and immobility once the role he has been taught ends...

...The multiple endings that follow are heartbreaking, a cascade of unforeseen consequences that reveal too well "the genuine Cretan labyrinths of human relationships...

...One of Tertuliano's greatest mistakes, itunfolds, is keeping his discovery of the double a secret from Maria...

...Another chorus member, Tertuliano's long-suffering lover, Maria da Paz, tries continually to draw him into deeper intimacy, with little success...

...Animated by the spark of obsession, Tertuliano cannot stop himself from renting video after video produced by the same studio to glimpse his double in one brief scene or another, but the actor plays parts so small his name is neveridentifiedwith a character in the credits...

...If only Tertuliano could hear these remarks along with the reader, rather than dutifully sitting through his colleague's heartfelt but tedious speech...

...Eventually Tertuliano rents a movie in which his mysterious double— their voices, too, are identical in tone and inflection—has a role large enough to be credited as Daniel Santa-Clara...

...His authorial commentaries nudge us to catch nuances in the text that might otherwise go unnoticed...

...Maria senses that something outside their relationship is troubling Tertuliano...

...Throughout The Doable, Saramago's voice defuses the tension of his gothic plot with a bemused, ironic take on "the skein of the human spirit...

...Tertuliano is past the point of stopping, however...

...The 1998 Nobel Laureate cannot bear to miss an opportunity to leave his witty, ironic fingerprints on the narrative...

...Unfortunately, Santa-Clara turns out to be a stage name...

...Breaking his silence would signal interest in the closeness she longs for...