As it happens he’s decided to go with, of all things, a surreal black comedy set in a vaguely Kafkaesque bureaucratic dystopia. His first feature as a director, Submarine, was a nostalgic coming-of-age romance set in 1980s Wales, lit and art-directed with painstaking attention to detail-a wisp of a film but the kind that leaves you keen to see what the director will turn to next. (Oct.Ayoade is a British comedian best known for his acting roles in the cult TV series Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (which he also co-created with the show’s star Matthew Holness) and The IT Crowd. This semi-allegory is certainly not one of Saramago's more noteworthy offerings. Afonso has several hokey "dialogues" with "common sense" his situation, which might be the germ for an excellent short story, is stretched out far beyond the length it deserves. Narrating in his usual long, rambling sentences, Saramago suspends his characters and their actions in fussy authorial asides. Soon the two are in a competition that involves sex and power. The actor, a rather sleazy fellow, resents Afonso's presence, as if his identical appearance were a sort of ontological theft. Finally tracking the man down, he suggests a meeting. Soon Afonso is feverishly renting videos, trying to find the actor's name, while hiding his project from his suspicious colleague, his lover and his mother. The video itself is a forgettable comedy, but the actor who plays the minor role of hotel clerk (so minor he isn't listed in the credits) is Afonso's physical double. On the suggestion of a colleague, one night Máximo watches a video that changes everything.
Middle-aged, divorced and in a relationship with a woman, Maria da Paz, he is bored with life.
Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is a history teacher in an unnamed metropolis (presumably Lisbon). The double motif, which has fascinated authors as diverse as Poe, Dostoyevski and Nabokov, is revived in this surprisingly listless novel by Portuguese master Saramago.
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