This book came out in 2002; while computers were on the scene, the Internet as we now know it was not, and neither were ubiquitous cell phones. I mention these facts because this is a book that depends on land lines and on methods other than Google to find out information. But this is also a book that deals with identity, and what we feel to be our identity, and it is a very good, and funny, and sad book.
Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is a divorced secondary history teacher who spends his nights reading about Mesopotamian civilizations; he has a girlfriend (he is thinking about ending the relationship) and a widowed mother. One of his colleagues, a math instructor, suggests that he watch a video, so Afonso gets the video from the video store and watches it that evening. It is not much of a film, and he goes to bed, but wakes up distressed; he puts the film back into the VCR, and realizes that a very minor character is his double, save that the actor has a mustache. This minor difference reassures Afonso, until he realizes that the movie came out five years ago – and that five years ago, he, Afonso, had a similar mustache. The movie only lists the names of the minor characters, not their roles. He decides to rent more movies by the production company, see if the actor is in any of those movies, and work out by process of elimination whom his double might be, in a city of some five million people. Thus begins a tale of deception, betrayal, love, rancor, and identity, with a twist at the end.
I very much enjoyed reading this book (in English translation); I doubt that I will watch the 2013 movie Enemy, which was adapted from this film, as I would worry that a minor character in the film might be my own double.
From The Recamier 