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.
...a compelling and far-reaching political detective story ... Especially when it comes to the political fallout from the pandemic, no other book I know of has been this intellectually adventurous, this loopily personal, or this entertaining ... Known primarily as a critic of globalization and a climate activist, our Naomi turns out to be that rarest of specimens: a leftist with self-irony ... Despite drawing such devastating connections, Klein maintains a perfectly calibrated tone toward Wolf, favoring calm argument over derision or contempt. Her preferred move is excavating the kernels of insight from even Wolf’s most out-there claims ... As a writer and a theorist, Klein is particularly talented at knitting together the sweep of history and the banalities of the present. She’s equally attuned to what doppelgängers can mean in a more transhistorical sense ... The originality and political courage of this book is to turn that into an opening, an entirely different way of thinking about our enemies—and our selves.
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.
The book is most engaging when Klein is essayistic rather than didactic. She deftly weaves in cultural representations of the double—from Dostoevsky and Graham Greene to Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock and Jordan Peele’s film Us—to frame her thinking. The peek down the rabbit hole is elucidating, saving the rest of us from 'a master’s degree’s worth of hours' immersed in 'extremely prolific and editing-averse' podcasts. Klein (or her on-page doppelgänger) is companionable and self-deprecating. Reading Doppelganger is like being seated next to someone really interesting at a dinner party . . . but that doesn’t stop the reader from beginning to check their watch before dessert ... Klein’s amiable company can start to feel like a Trojan horse: I found myself wondering how I had gone from chuckling about Roth’s 'mommy issues' to reading about Red Vienna. The book ends not with a bang but a whimper.
There is a remarkable level of compassion and respect that Klein shows her mirror-figure in this book. She does not deal the low blows that would have been easy to land (and the opportunities for which are many), and while she does examine Wolf’s persona, work and life, she is never playing the woman ... Klein’s reckoning, in Doppelganger, is wide-ranging—it leads into explorations and analyses of social media and the public, commodified or branded self that they feed upon; into wellness culture and its ties with conspiracy theorists; big data and big tech; the destabilization of long-told narratives about colonialism, nationhood and identity ... This breadth of material is energising and often surprising in its deployment, and is one of the real pleasures of the book. Klein’s ability to make concrete and personal some of the biggest and most abstract ideas in her critique, too, make Doppelganger a very compelling read.
This is a brilliant insight, but it’s a column, not a book. With another 200 pages to fill, Klein broadens her thesis. Conspiracy theories, she tells us, are the twisted doppelgänger of investigative journalism. A personal brand is a doppelgänger of the self, as is an online avatar ... Doppelganger is a surprisingly funny book and packed full of ideas, including about areas I simply haven’t the space to cover, such as the dalliance between the Bannonesque right and, for example, yoga practitioners. It also, at its heart, makes a truly worthwhile distinction between two sorts of thinkers who are often conflated, even when they’re not all called Naomi. On the one hand, you have those like Klein, who will flirt with conspiratorialism in a genuine effort to scrutinise the motives and machinations of the powerful. On the other, there are those like Wolf, who lack that filter and will believe almost anything. It strikes me, all the same, that there’s a string of inspiration and culpability that runs between the first type and the second that Klein, while worrying about it, never quite manages to address.
By the end, I wondered if maybe Klein had come closer than ever to cracking the code that reveals what, really, is at the heart of our collective dysfunction ... Throughout Doppelganger, Klein blends the personal and the political so seamlessly that it’s hard to imagine they could ever be apart. She writes about her autistic son, the historical underpinnings of Nazism, and the state of Israel, all through the lens of the duality at the heart of her book. She tells how some of the same Canadian truckers who took part in a 2021 convoy to express solidarity with that country’s Indigenous peoples following revelations about the mass graves of Native children also took part, eight months later, in a trucker blockade to protest an intolerable vaccination mandate. Klein’s invaluable message: It is by learning to see double that we can see straight.
Doppelganger is a weird book. How could it be anything else? It is a deposition filed to prove that the author is not the same person as her subject. It is a horror story that describes how it feels to have your public identity intruded upon, cuckoo-like, by a monstrous rival. It is an attempt to understand the popularity of the conspiracy circus in which Wolf is now a leading performer ... Klein’s relationship with Wolf gave her the mirror as an instrument to analyse conspiracy culture. I’m not sure the rest of us need it. We might simply think of Wolf’s work as a bad habit that flourishes in media spaces where standards are sufficiently low to permit it: Steve Bannon’s War Room, for instance, or (to pick an example closer to home) GB News, which was happy to broadcast Wolf’s falsehoods about the vaccine, unopposed, until Ofcom intervened. But Klein needs the mirror because, ultimately, Doppelganger is about her.
With alternative-fact-fueled rhetoric undermining essential institutions, Klein recognizes that an individual’s vulnerability to malignant outside influences is symptomatic of widespread threats to cultural norms. Her provocative thought exercise illuminates the myriad ways taken-for-granted balances can be upended and calls for heightened awareness of the dangers of identity erosion on both large and small scales.
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.
Klein excels at identifying patterns and calmly and rationally exploring and explaining them. Although the topics she writes about are frightening for those who fear for a future defined by climate disaster, extreme inequality and war, the ways in which she draws connections, backed up with compelling and well-researched and -reasoned evidence, is, in an odd way, reassuring. It provides confirmation that readers who have noticed some of these phenomena are not crazy.
Klein’s writing is perceptive and intriguingly personal, but the doppelgänger theme begins to feel slightly overextended, with too many variations muddling the metaphor. However, by articulating such an expansive view of the uncanny, Klein’s mesmerizing narrative reflects the unique anxieties and modes of analysis that have come to dominate the online era. Like Klein’s previous books, it’s a definitive signpost of the times.
