The Double in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Jun 19, 2008 Jeff Scott rated it it was amazing

Shelves: own, classics, 1001books, fiction, magical-realism, surreal, stream-of-consciousness, portuguese-fiction, favorites

...the home of a secondary school teacher who doesn't earn very much, a fact that may be capricious pigheadedness or the result of a historical penalty as yet still unpaid.11

The wheel was invented and stayed invented forever and ever, whereas words, those and all the others, came into the world with a vague, diffuse destiny, as highly provisional phonetic and morphological clusters, however much, thanks perhaps to the inherited glow of their glorious creation, they may insist on passing themselv

...the home of a secondary school teacher who doesn't earn very much, a fact that may be capricious pigheadedness or the result of a historical penalty as yet still unpaid.11

The wheel was invented and stayed invented forever and ever, whereas words, those and all the others, came into the world with a vague, diffuse destiny, as highly provisional phonetic and morphological clusters, however much, thanks perhaps to the inherited glow of their glorious creation, they may insist on passing themselves off, not so much in their own right, but on behalf of the thing they variably mean and represent, as immortal, undying, or eternal, depending on the taste of the person doing the classifying. P 56

...it's not every day that someone turns up and tells us that common sense is nothing but a chapter from a statistics book and that what every library in the world lacks is a history of common sense from the time of Adam and Eve were driven out of Paradise. P 61

...how can we explain what happened, we pile up words, words, and more words, the very words we talked about elsewhere, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, and, however we try, however hard we struggle, we always find ourselves outside the feelings we so ingeniously hoped to describe, as if a feeling were like a landscape with mountains in the distance and trees in the foreground...p 97

We don't know what precisely awaits us beyond each action we take.

...and such letters are never kept, of course, they all pass through the paper shredder, all those longings and emotions reduced to the misery of a pile of indecipherable little strips. P235

Every second that passes is like a door that opens to allow in what has nit yet happened, what we call the future, but, to challenge the contradictory nature of what we have just said, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the future is just an immense void, that the future is just the time in which the eternal present feeds. If the future is empty, thought Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, then nothing that one might call Sunday exists, its possible existence depends on my existence, if I were to die now, part of the future or part of possible futures would be canceled out forever. The conclusion Tertuliano Maximo Afonso was about to reach, For Sunday to exist I must continue to exist...p 213

...it's impossible not to have enemies, that enemies are born not out of our will to have them but out of their irresistible desire to have us. P229 ...more

Like · see review