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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, born in 1922, has not let the Nobel Prize, which he received in 1998, slow him down. He was a late starter in the lists of fiction, having been a civil servant and sometime journalist to the age of fifty. He found his groove in the baroque magic-realist historical novel "Baltasar and Blimunda" (1982 in Portugal, when he turned sixty; 1987 in the U.S.), and combines, in the novels of his productive eighth decade--"Blindness" (1995, 1997), "All the Names" (1997, 1999), and "The Cave" (2000, 2002)--fantastic premises with a relaxed, disarmingly direct style and a quizzical, respectful interest in everyday life. His prose is open to philosophical and psychological speculation as well as to homely folk wisdom, and its flights into the impossible are balanced by a feeling for the daily routines and labors that compose, for most of humanity, the substance of existence. Saramago is, in the not uncommon fashion of Latin intellectuals, an avowed Communist; his sympathy for workers broadens and solidifies his fictional thought-experiments.
His new novel, "The Double" (published in Portuguese in 2002; translated by Margaret Jull Costa; Harcourt; $25), deals with white-collar workers: the thirty-eight-year-old hero, the impressively named Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, teaches history in a secondary school; the divorced Tertuliano's present lady friend, Maria da Paz, works in a bank; Tertuliano's double, Antonio Claro, acts in minor movie roles under the name of Daniel Santa-Clara; his wife, Helena, works in a travel agency. 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,...
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