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    The Double
    The Double
    The Double
    Ebook222 pages5 hours

    The Double

    By Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Advised by his doctor to become more sociable, Golyadkin, a low-level bureaucrat, arrives uninvited at a birthday party his office manager is having for his daughter. After a number of socially awkward and increasingly uncomfortable moments, Golyadkin is asked to leave and flees the party. While making his way home through a snowstorm, an extraordinary thing happens: Golyadkin meets his double.

    At first the two are friendly, but it quickly becomes apparent to Golyadkin that the double intends to take over his life, and the success that the double makes of Golyadkin’s life may be driving the original to the edge of sanity. The Double was adapted for film in 2014, and starred Jesse Eisenberg of The Social Network.

    HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 29, 2014
    ISBN9781443436144
    Author

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. He died in 1881 having written some of the most celebrated works in the history of literature, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov.

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    Reviews for The Double

    4/5

    471 ratings32 reviews

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    • 5/5
      fantastic; only book I ever got to the last chapter; then read the whole thing through again before reading the last chapter.
    • 3/5
      Dit was het eerste werk van Dostojevski dat ik las, op 16 jaar. Was er meteen weg van! Heb daarna bijna zijn hele oeuvre verslonden.
    • 3/5
      Dit was het eerste werk van Dostojevski dat ik las, op 16 jaar. Was er meteen weg van! Heb daarna bijna zijn hele oeuvre verslonden.
    • 5/5
      Poor Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin. I, too, long had a presentiment of his fate. What a cracking read. Dostoevsky was a master at getting across the feverish hell of madness. I couldn't not read, even though the events that befall Mr Golyadkin at the hands of his double made me uncomfortable in a similar way to Curb Your Enthusiasm. Horrific, exasperating and sad, all at the same time.
    • 3/5
      I picked this up from the library because the new Richard Ayoade-directed Eisenberg-and-Wasikowska movie was coming out and IT LOOKED SO TRIPPILY AWESOME. The book, on the other hand (my first Dostoyevsky, no less) was... well, definitely trippy. Not that awesome, sadly. It's chaotic and fractured and although I did enjoy it, and felt very sorry for poor Golyadkin as he slowly went mad, by the end it had become so disjointed and hard to connect with him at all that I was glad to have finished it. It was only 137 pages, but it took me a long time to read because it was - purposely, admittedly - so choppy. The adaptation, incidentally, worked better for me, but I think I'm still going to need a second viewing to get my head round it!
    • 2/5
      Having read and enjoyed "Crime and Punishment" years ago, I really looked forward to reading "The Double". I found, reading this book was akin to walking through sludge in a pair of bedroom slippers.Dostoevsky introduces the reader to Yakov Petrovitch Golyadkin, an office worker living in Moscow. Not only are we introduced to him, but embark on an often frustrating and confusing journey through Golyadkin's mind, as he's psychologically falling apart. This mental collapse resulted in this reader feeling trapped a "maze-like" story, where twists and turns left me confused, having to reread sentences and even backing up to reread pages to see where I had become confused (and never finding the source of confusion). Dostoevsky was skillful in his manner of writing, as I can only infer, what the mind of a person who is losing theirs, endures. As I read, I felt physically bound to Golyadkin, as if tethered to him This further resulted in feeling even more constricted, confined, frustrated and confused. I don't know if Dostoevsky intended for the reader to experience such emotion and physical connection, however, it was my experience and found it brilliant, although hating it at the same time.Adding to this frustration was the constant repetition of the names. Nevermind Russian is difficult to roll off this American reader's tongue, was it really necessary to repeat names over and over, and to have to say first, middle and last each time? Perhaps this is typical of Russian dialogue during this time period, however, it added to the chaotic nature of the story.I could never determine whether "the double" was an actual person, or one drawn in Golyadkin's mind. Although other characters seemed to interact with "Junior", was it because he was real or was it Golyadkin's perception of the situation? Could this uncertainty be another of Dostoevsky's crafts, further enhancing the chaotic state of Golyadkin's mind? Whatever the case, I found it frustrating to not know, but ok with not knowing, as it fit with the story.I cannot say I enjoyed this book, as it was difficult and not comfortable or relaxing, which is why I read. It was, however, skillful and emotional, also why I read. As a book, it fulfilled its duty to escort me to another world and time, taking me on a journey I otherwise would not have experienced. In that sense, "The Double" was a worthy read.Score: 3
    • 4/5
      The double by Fyodor Dostoevsky was not an easy book to read. I was "lucky" in the sense that my edition (Great short works of Dostoyevsky) did not have an extensive introduction. However, as a trained philologist, one does not come entirely free from preconceptions to a literary work like this, and these preconceptions do make things easier, at least not while reading.The story is that of a clerk, whose life is "invaded" by a persona, virtually his double. Especially in the beginning, the introduction of this double is so masterly, that I experienced a loss of orientation, and switch of perspective, which made me uncertain whether I was "seeing" through the eyes of the "original" Golyadkin (later dubbed "senior") or the double (later dubbed "junior").The intrusive Golyadkin junior is perceived by senior as a threat to his position and his existence. Various scenes are played out at the office, in which junior is supposedly trying to replace senior, superseding senior by outstanding performance or making senior look bad in the eyes of his (their) superiors.Towards the end of this short novel, the reader presented with a logical resolution, namely that Golyadkin has all along been suffering from delusions, and experienced a mental breakdown. The final page superbly reminds us of Philip Roth's Portnoy's complaint.However, another way of reading is possible. Last year, I read Notes from the underground in which a destitute character refers to himself as an insignificant "insect", a total nobody, as opposed to a "hero". The image of the insect made me think of Kafka's Die Verwandlung. While a mental breakdown, and schizophrenic delusion is the most rational explanation for Golyadkin's behaviour, it would still be possible to interpret his visions subjectively, as an externalised threat. For quite a while, reading The double I felt that Golyadkin senior projected his own image on a new employee, an new clerk at the office, equally insignificant as himself. Many of Golyadkin's fears and frantic behaviour to prove himself worthy, or true, could be explained if he felt threatened in his existence by a newcomer who would try to take his place, or possible even oust him. This type of situation is not uncommon in the work place, and as a phenomenon it may have been novel in the mid-nineteenth century.A difficult read with a lot to think about, I will probably need to reread it some other time.
    • 2/5
      Exhausting and bathotic.
    • 4/5
      This is my first foray into the world of Dostoevsky, and appropriate as it so differs from his later period of writing (after hard labour). While I accept this work as a psychological study, it seems to me this book has many other levels to it also. This is a 'fantastic' novella. The fantastic 'is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event' (Todorov, 1975). It is through this genre that the unexplained supernatural is never explained, and left to the reader to decipher, which is most often impossible. It lies between the marvelous and the uncanny. This novella is a clear example of it because of (in my opinion one of the more interesting aspects of the book) the unreliable narrator. I see his as yet another double of the main character, Goliadkin senior, with 'our hero' meaning the narrator's and self's hero. To the reader, we do not see any sense of a real hero. He even begins to adopt Goliadkin's speech patterns towards the end. The narrator is so unreliable that we are never given a real witness to the existence of goliadkin junior, nor is the reader denied that existence. The novella is puzzling, and difficult to decipher at times. Though he was hailed as a new critical voice in the realist veign, this novella proved dostoevskii could not be so easily pigeon-holed, and displayed his true genius. The first half reads a bit slowly, but the second half flies by (after the supernatural begins). I highly recommend this book as a light introduction to Dostoevskii.
    • 3/5
      It was compelling, but I'm not sure I understand what actually happened at the end...
    • 4/5
      An amazing story about obsession and paranoia. It is a psychological miasma that also reflects heavily upon Russia during the time that Dostoevsky lived in. There is so much great literary value in this. It can be interpreted many different ways, and the subtext of many of the themes that keep reiterating themselves, as if cast down by snow, are innumerable.

      A thrilling read. Recommended for those interested in classics.
    • 4/5
      (Original Review, 1981-03-23)About how to interpret or read a text. And I am going to use 'he' as my generic pronoun because Hammett was a he.One perfectly valid way is indeed to try to stick as closely as possible to exactly what is in the text and maybe some biographic info, at least a rough knowledge of the time and space of the action, and whatever is known of the author's intentions. In some measure we MUST do thaFor the writers intentions there is a theory of the intentional fallacy: the text says what it says not what the author says it says. For example an author may think he is writing a strong female character when writing about Stella, stunningly beautiful, highly competent executive assistant to self-made billionaire Brad. In fact Stella is a male fantasy. Even the best writers can 'mean' the unintended. For example in Milton's Paradise Lost, Milton unintentionally made Satan into quite a compelling, sublimely majestic figure who made God look like a mean spirited despot. And indeed Milton's Satan evolved into a positive, if flawed, hero type, although subsequent writers were often more comfortable with the figure of Prometheus whose story in Aeschylus' Prometheus Unbound is less tainted by associations with the negativity of Satan's Christian Antichrist image.Writers have lived biographies, lived through their specific times. Just like non-writers. But writers ARE writers. Literature is a vast and mighty river of the expression of being human. No writer of any worth, however innovative or creative, just creates a brand new world of Literature. What a writer reads is to a writer very similar in concept to the very times he lives through. He is living through the Literature he has read just as he has lived through the times. Of course real life may be more powerfully impressed on him such as the death of a loved one, or fighting in a war. But his reading is an important part of his life experience of his very being in the world.So if Hammet created a character which reminds one of a series of other characters going back centuries it is perfectly legitimate to discuss it in terms of Literature just as it would be to discuss the political environment of the times. Literature is fundamentally intertextual. Texts refer as much to each other as to the world. Positively and negatively. Literature is the very psychic life blood of a writer. It is an indelible inextricable part of his biography.Hammett I take to have a brilliant literary mind and to be well read in Literature. I take him to be able to know what a Byronic Hero is, what others thought about that, to have his own thoughts about it, as well as lots of other things (like about detective stories), of course. And I take him to have an idea of what a parable is and how it differs from a story, or what an archetype or double is. Take the 'double': all he has to do is READ Poe's William Wilson, or Dostoevsky’s “The Double” to get what it is as Literature. Or to read Hamlet to know how a “mise en abyme” works. He knows these things and uses them WITH THE MIND OF A BRILLIANT WRITER. A mind that processes literature not as a critic or simple reader, but as a creator of it.So if he fails to say IN the text, "Sam Spade, flawed Byronic Hero, was sitting in his office", that does not mean that Sam Spade is not a Byronic Hero type. If he creates a parable or “mise en abyme” he need not tell us that is what he is doing, nor is it particularly virtuous of us to ignore it because it isn't explicit, to ignore that he is a writer and that is the kind of thing writers do.Is Sam Spade such a figure? Maybe, maybe not. But we can look at his character and compare it to others in Literature. But just because DH doesn't say so, doesn't mean we are reading into it what is not there. Yes it is implicit, but that is about the only way it could be there. Byron too did not say: "Manfred, a Promethean archetype, was brooding on a dark and lonely crag." You have to read it INTO the text yourself. Maybe I am wrong to think DH could have written deeply conflicting archetypal characters like Brigid and Sam who are yet deeply attracted. But I think it is both possible and likely. But it is ONLY interpretation. He didn't SAY, "Into the office strolled Sam's counter archetype, Brigid".It can sound like a stretch but great literature does that all the time. What you have to do is see if there are clues in the text. Because DH DID say Sam looked like a Satan. He did create a strange and powerful emotional entanglement between Brigid and Sam and she is a corrupt devil type (Christian) and he a Satanic man of his own will (Miltonian). And so on. Did he? Maybe it isn't as impressive as I think it is, but that IS the kind of things great writers do, so why not Hammett? But I think the Sam Brigid 'love' story is sublimely brilliantly conceived and written, BECAUSE of that. Does it HAVE to just be an extremely well written noir detective novel? Not for me.At this time, you’re thinking: “Is this a review about The Double” or about “The Maltese Falcon” or "Paradise Lost"? Ah. That’s always the conundrum… If you’ve been following my reviews, you know I don’t write straightforward stuff. It’s all about Intertextuality and Close Reading for me. Coming back to “The Double” and trying to be more incisive, I really loved it, especially from the point where the doppelganger actually arrives and in the rather brilliant ending. I think that it has a problem though, which is that it's not at all what you might think before you go in, so people might go in thinking it's going to be a straightforward laugh-out-loud comedy and it really isn't and is very unsettling and complex. I would have given it 4 stars, but slightly better than “Under the Skin” for me (controversial) (I was worried at first that it was going to be a bit too "Brazil", but it just nodded and then moved on.)
    • 5/5
      The Double was Dostoevsky’s second book, published in 1846, in the period of his life before being sentenced to hard labor for having been involved in the Petrashevsky circle. He had already been recognized by the important critic Belinsky for his first book, Poor Folk, but was yet to emerge from the ten-year period of penal servitude and exile in Siberia as the man who would crank out the works that he is most known for over the years 1866-1880. Sadly for Dostoevsky, The Double was criticized for being dull and long-winded, which severely hurt the sensitive young author. Happily for us, he took the criticism to heart, and twenty years later, at the height of his powers, significantly revised it. The result is outstanding. The first five chapters are stunning, and one wonders wow, where will he go with this? And it’s captivating to the last page.The Double is about the socially awkward clerk Golyadkin, self-described as “a man apart”, who is surprised on a snowy bridge one night to find his double. This double is a sort of alter ego, and it quickly becomes apparent that he is everything Golyadkin is not. He is perfect in society, acts with grace and elegance, and is the complete opposite of Golyadkin, quickly succeeding in the office and in society where Golyadkin had been frustrated. Golyadkin becomes confused, disoriented, further isolated, and backed into a corner as his standing is further reduced on all fronts, including with his servant. He reacts alternately with indecision and angst, followed by impulse and somewhat random behavior. We empathize with him but he’s artless and clumsy, constantly second guessing himself, and is never at ease. He continues to fight what seems to be a battle he can’t win, at one point feeling too “annihilated, shrunken, impotent” to go on. He becomes increasingly shunned as he tries to right wrongs that his double is perpetrating. The book is a study on several levels, and in the most obvious sense shows the struggle between the awkward, isolated individual and society with its schemers. In another sense it could be viewed as all internal, a spiritual struggle with one’s own self to keep hold of one’s principles and core identity intact. The description of events is dreamlike at times and one wonders if it’s possibly a long nightmare, or perhaps better put, allegory for the nightmare of existence, or a descent into madness. It also works straight up as an eerie, creepy tale.One can clearly see young Dostoevsky in the main character, one who was not like everyone else, those who were smooth, deft, and wore their society masks well. Golyadkin is innocent and wants to trust others, and yet is deceived, scorned, and judged at each turn. The novel is existential and well ahead of its time, prefetching Kafka. Along those lines it was interesting to me that at one point Golyadkin says that next to a tall and handsome fellow at a ball, he feels like a “real little insect”. Even the narrator feels inadequate (“Oh, if I were a poet! It goes without saying, at least such a one as Homer or Pushkin; with a lesser talent you can’t poke your nose in…”) and is also an outsider, capable of empathy and true understanding of darkness and isolation only (“It goes without saying that my pen is too weak, limp and blunt for a respectable depiction of the ball…”). And one can picture Dostoevsky looking on with a mixture of disgust and envy those who, like the double, fit into the category of being “a mischievous one, a frisky one, a crawly one, a chuckling one, fleet of tongue and foot”, and who “worm their way” through crowds and society.Great stuff, and underrated. This edition also contained 23 pages of excellent “extra material” at the end, covering Dostoevsky’s life and his works in separate sections, which I never tire of reading. Just this quote, on winter in St. Petersburg, which is described later as the “final proof of fate’s persecution” against Golyadkin:“It was an awful November night – wet, misty, rainy, snowy, pregnant with gumboils, head colds, cold sores, sore throats, fevers of all possible types and kinds – in short, with all the gifts of November in St. Petersburg. The wind howled in the deserted streets, raising the black water of the Fontanka higher than the mooring rings and plucking provocatively at the scrawny streetlights of the embankment which, in their turn, echoed its howling with the thin, piercing creaking which composed the endless, squeaking, tinkling concert so familiar to every resident of St. Petersburg. It was raining and snowing all at once. Streams of rainwater with the wind ripping through them were gushing all but horizontally, as if from a fire hose, and pricked and whipped the face of the unfortunate Mr. Golyadkin like thousands of pins and needles.”
    • 5/5
      I find Jose Saramgo's work so challenging to read -- I really wish he would give up his unique style and use a few more paragraphs and quotation marks. As challenging as his style is for me, it's always worth the struggle in the end -- I find his stories to be so creative, interesting and different. "The Double" was no exception.In this book Tertuliano watches a movie on video and find a man who is identical to him who has a bit part in the film. The man is a duplicate of Tertuliano down to the very scar on his knee and Tuertuliano becomes obsessed with finding out more about him.The story takes some interesting twists and turns along the way. What I thought was the inevitable conclusion played out differently than I expected. I found this to be a clever and fun story.
    • 4/5
      The Double by Jose Saramago is the story of a history teacher who, while watching a film, spots a minor actor who is his exact physical double. This sends him into a frenzy of renting videos to try and find out who this actor is all the while hiding this activity from his lover, his mother and a suspicious colleague. When he finally discovers the identity of the actor, he first suggests a meeting.These two men are much more than simply look-alikes, they share the same birth date, have the same birth mark and each one has a scar on a knee from a childhood injury. The history teacher becomes obsessed as to what will happen to one when the other dies. The actor is not happy with having a mirror image and the story escalates into a competition which does set the stage for the dramatic closing.This was a very interesting story but unfortunately I had a difficult time with the reading. The author writes in long winding sentences, using a lot of commas but very few periods. The result is a rambling, often confusing narrative. There were also the author’s frequent asides to the reader which didn’t help to keep my concentration on the story. Although the author’s style was not to my taste, I did find the story very intriguing and one that I needed to keep reading to find out what happened next.
    • 5/5
      Rather slow but atmospheric book. Awesome ending!
    • 5/5
      Saramago was a unique literary magician, and this is one of his most hauntingly memorable books. This one is a real slow burner, which demands great patience of its reader, but like so many of Saramago's books it is full of dry humour. The first part of the book might even be described as dull, as the long and apparently rambling sentences, conversations without quotes, and occasional asides from his omniscient narrator set up a picture of an unsympathetic and drab antihero, a depressed history teacher who watches a video recommended by a colleague and sees a bit part actor who is his exact likeness. As in his modern parables Blindness, Seeing and Death at Intervals, Saramago takes an implausible scenario and slowly and inexorably explores the consequences - this one is a more personal story.The last 100 pages or so are absolutely gripping and the denouement is very clever - many readers may not get that far, but those who do may find the book unforgettable.
    • 3/5
      This one wasn't quite as gripping as some of his others. It was an intriguing concept and an interesting analysis of identity, but I wasn't convinced about the characters' actions and found the first half, in particular, slow to get going and overloaded with unexciting details.
    • 5/5
      Having enjoyed and admired Jose Saramago’s The Cave I sought this one out. He is the master of “what if” - he gets you to accept the most implausible situations as if it is merely unusual rather than “science fiction.” By turns comical, intriguing and thrilling. The story centers around a man discovering he has a double (a possible twin is never mentioned) and tracking him down. I wasn’t expecting the writing to be so drole. I had to get used to his writing style but now I rarely even noticed the paucity of punctuation. Others have criticized the use of the narrator, which if at times is long winded, but adds both depth and amusement. I think The Double is even better than everyone’s favorite Blindness and ( my previous favorite) The Cave.
    • 2/5
      as you read this review remember that i will tell you how to feel about it and remind you along the way just what you are supposed to be thinking, which means that you don’t need to think at all, in fact, and so the book also treats its readers in this way, repeating the main character’s name over and over and over each and every time he talks about him, pronouns, it seems, like usual punctuation and paragraph breaks, do not have any place in this book, and, it turns out, neither did i, since i stopped reading it just before the midpoint, it’s too bad, too, because the premise of this book is intriguing (the only reason i did not give 1 star) but the execution was pedantic and patronizing - of course, maybe i just can’t register the genius that is this book.
    • 4/5
      Stunning and hilarious. In competition with Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle for the best book I've read this year.
    • 4/5
      I thought this book was one of his most creative books and I really liked its exploration of identity. The protagonist sees a man who looks just like him as an extra in a film and goes on a mission to track down this person. Honestly, I'd probably give this one a 4 1/2 out of 5 but this format doesn't really allow it. I thought it was incredibly original even though it wasn't necessarily as profound as some of his others and I enjoyed it immensely. A word of warning for those not familiar with Saramago: his writing style takes a bit of getting used to because he doesn't use quotes to indicate when people are talking so it feels very confusing and stream of consciousness at first. A great example of experimental fiction!
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      I picked this up from the remaindered table at Barnes and Noble. Interestingly, it was on a tabel labeled "Beach Reads." I can imagine some every confused folks lying about the sands of Myrtle Beach. This is one trippy mind-bending book. Saramago has a way of asking some really ingenious "what-ifs" and takes them on a crazy ride. In this book a teacher, a rather Milquetoast sort of fellow, finds he has a double, a not very successful actor. His quest to find his double has consequences he never imagined. Saramago was one of the greatest writers of his generations, certainly one of the most creative. That said his style is challenging. While taking break from reading, I left it laying on my bed; my eleven year old daughter picked it up and began reading it aloud. After a page, she declared, "has he ever heard of periods." To which I replied, he wasn't a big fan. She noted, "you can't stop anywhere, it's comma, comma, comma." Yes, but he has his reasons." She answered, "Yeah, it becomes addictive. It's like hypnosis." It does that, and more.
    • 5/5
      The Double is a great example of Saramago's analogical narrative style. I have only read one other of his - Blindness - but both seem to me to begin conceptually with a simple question and proceed to explore the implication through to its logical conclusion.In this case the question is "What if there were two completely identical people?" and the exploration unfolds as Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, school teacher, discovers a man who looks exactly (uncannily) like him playing a bit part in a rented B-movie.Saramago's minimalist style is manifested at its most pristine here. The stripping away of large parts of formatting, coupled with the author’s own speculative intrusions, serves to keep us conscious of our presence as a reader because the story doesn’t just run smoothly on polished tracks like so much pulp fiction. While this can be alienating at times, it is definitely a service to the novel, as its full value is not merely as anecdote but metaphor, and the more we can ponder what is happening the more we as readers get out of it. Saramago, like Kundera, definitely knows and believes this.I am not sure if Saramago belongs to a school, or has ever been classified as being part of a literary movement but if I were to taxonomise in this case I would class his work as ‘neo-surrealist’, for although his premises and situations are fantastical, the exposition is firmly grounded in reality. At times, The Double made me literally laugh out loud just for its sheer brilliance. I could see through the farcical nature of the plot to see how sharp an observer of human nature Saramago is.To look at it another way, the plot itself works well as a gripping gothic thriller, but layered atop that is a Kafkaesque analogy about identity, obsession and the darker side of humanity. Regardless of where it sits in literary reception it is a work that can be at once thoroughly enjoyable and profoundly challenging.
    • 4/5
      Mr. Saramago makes demands on his readers, but he also offers great rewards. The story in a myth that leds to us looking at deeper issues. I enjoyed the book
    • 5/5
      Outstanding story. Gets better and better as it moves to a conclusion as satisfying as it is unexpected. The underlying commentary on cinema is brilliantly done.
    • 4/5
      If this book had been written by another author, it would likely receive 5 stars from me; it's a brilliant book. However, in comparison with Saramago's other work -- notably Blindness and The Gospel According To Jesus Christ -- this book could only receive 5 stars if I could give them 10. The Double is a dark comedy of manners, and as such it is a higher entertainment; the other books mentioned are penetrating works of genius of the highest order.

      This is not to fault Saramago for having written this book; it is a proud accomplishment in his canon.
    • 5/5
      Saramago is one of the most amazing authors I have ever come across. Reading his work is very much like appreciating classical music. Some authors write bubble-gum books, some rock, some alternative... Jose Saramago writes classical. If you haven't read Saramago before, be prepared for writing that forces you to pay close attention to every word... it is like no other author I have ever read. This book did not let me down. I love the premise of this book and feel that he masterfully deals with the topic. I literally gasped at one point of the book. After reading "The Cave", and now this book, I have realized that I must read all of his works. It is like being exposed, for the first time, to Mozart. You can't just listen to one of his works and not want to hear the rest.
    • 4/5
      Recommended in "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die", "The Double" is a fiction about the identity from the nobel prize author Jose Saramago.It all began when Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a history teacher, decided to watch a video that his colleague, the mathematics teacher, recommended to him. In that video he noticed that one of the supporting actor looked exactly like him. Curious, he tried to find him and investigated this out, not believing that there exists a person that is so identical, down to the mole and scar to himself. Thus the adventure begin.What happens when you have a double that even your spouse could not even tell? How about your mother? Or your dog? Can they identify which one are you? What would be the consequences in finding out that you're no longer unique? A quote from the book:... They say you can only hate someone if you hate yourself, but the worst of all hatreds must be the hatred that cannot bear another person to be the same, worse still if that sameness should ever become total.The psychological prose-style format suits my taste really well. It was a bit slow in the middle but then towards the end the speed paced up. I found the first 10 pages and the last 10-20 pages are the most interesting. Perhaps the only wish to make this better is to extend this last 10-20 pages. I think there's a lot more psychologically that can happen here which will make the book more balanced. However overall I enjoyed the book immensely. I think it's a good material to be a movie.

    Book preview

    The Double - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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