Feels like falling down a rabbit hole, albeit a dazzling and erudite one ... On her highbrow romp through this disturbing underworld, Klein’s writing is clear, dynamic, ruthlessly honest, imbued with a rare integrity. She brings unusual rigor to her examinations of herself, including her flaws. She is that nearly extinct breed of activist: one who never stops questioning orthodoxies and interrogating her own beliefs. Doppelganger showcases her superb ability to cut through clichés and received ideas, as well as intellectual conventions ... There is a drama and stylishness to her inquiry that is hard to resist. By deploying the idiom of psychological thrillers, she infuses energy into her often dense or theoretical material.
This story of mistaken identity would on its own be gripping and revealing enough, both as a psychological study and for its explorations of the double in art and history, the disorienting effects of social media, and the queasy feeling of looking into a distorted mirror. But the larger subject of Doppelganger turns out to be a far more complex and consequential confusion: Its guiding question is how so many people have in recent years broken with conventional left-right political affiliations and a shared understanding of reality ... Doppelganger could have followed the contours of so many stories of doubles and stolen identities and evil twins, in which the goal is chiefly to unmask the impostor; with the doppelgänger vanquished, order is restored, and all is well again. Klein is clear that this story is not that simple.
Klein’s real interest, as you might expect from her previous work, tends more toward sociology than psychology. Her doppelgänger isn’t an opportunist or a con artist, Klein decides, but a genuine believer ... But what about the culture that has enabled her to thrive? ... [An] ambitious agenda ... This can be a frustrating book ... Still, Klein emerges with a sense of resolution.
Doppelganger is an evolution for Klein, in terms of its style and content. Whereas her other books knitted together on-the-ground reporting with analysis and polemic, this new work takes an altogether more personal approach. She uses the metaphor of the doppelganger as a way to explore our post-truth political moment ... The lucidity of Klein’s prose and the ease with which she weaves together cultural analysis (looking at the theme doppelganger in art, film and literature), political commentary and personal reflection makes this a deeply compelling read ... Klein gives shape and context to that apocalyptic mindset – and implores us to offer-up an alternative.
The scope is so wide-ranging that at times the reader can wonder how everything is linked, but Klein always keeps a grip of the common threads even as she sways off the path a little ... The result is like your smartest friend guiding you through a rather knotty personal conundrum that just happens to involve the most pressing issues of our age ... While it’s not an easy read in terms of the topics it explores, and can at times feel a little too wide-ranging, Doppelganger is an often frightening capturing of the strange times we live in.
You may well wonder how such a faintly comical theme can be extended for 350 pages, and what it has to do with Klein’s usual preoccupations of combating corporate capitalism and climate crisis. It is certainly the most introspective and whimsical of Klein’s books to date, but it is also one of surprising insights, unexpected connections and great subtlety. The Klein/Wolf confusion is an entry point to consider wider forms of disorientation that afflict the left ... This is a book that offers scant optimism for the future, but if there is hope lingering here, it’s that collective self-reflection – through historical knowledge and organising – offers political resources that solitary self-reflection never will. True to form, Klein’s ultimate message is log off and get on to the streets.
Klein’s instinct is not only to condemn. She makes the important case that the very nature of polarity now means that crucial journalistic questions go unanswered ... Powerful.
Often fascinating and, like much of Klein’s previous writing, not without neat coinages and pithy, memorable formulae ... Klein’s book suffers from the fact that there is already such an intense and compelling library of doppelgänger film and literature against which to compare ... Although much of it is compelling, it does suffer from a kind of airport-book schematism, a habit of fitting too many phenomena too neatly into its titular conceptual framework.
Klein’s prose is tight and urgent, almost breathless, evoking both laughter and dismay and entrancingly matching the mounting frenzy of seeing your public self morph into someone else—or of watching conspiracy theories take hold, particularly in the destabilizing context of the pandemic. Braiding cultural criticism with a charitable attempt to humanize the 'Other Naomi,' Klein excavates legitimacy beneath sensational fears and exposes the failures of both sides of so many of the world’s binaries ... A disarming and addictive call to solidarity.
