The Double - Jose Saramago

I first read Jose Saramago YEARS ago - reading Baltisar & Blimunda to review for my university student newspaper. I loved his take on fantasy and with his successive works the way he has used his bold imagination to comment on the world. The Double concerns a history teacher who watches a video and is disturbed to discover that one of the actors is physially identical to him. He then begins to obsess on this threat to his sense of self and individuality and begins a quest to find this double. This quest provides both a wonderfully suspenseful and reflective narrative, as well as an opportunity to provoke and question. Saramago asks the question of what is individuality and the importance of this notion to our sense of who we are. The Double explores what happens when this taken for granted quality is abruptly threatened.
Saramago was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature so he doesn't need me to big him up - but all the same he's a delightful, playful and wildly imaginative writer and deserves devouring.